Collections

Are you a collector? I am. I’ve been a collector all my life.

My first collection was snail shells. I was four or five and we lived in Oxfordshire. I remember that the garden was full of snails. Large brown snails, small yellow snails, red, black, brown striped – all colours, all sizes. I used to catch the snails and, with a darning needle, scoop out the creature from within. After two weeks soaking in vinegar and a good wash in soapy water, the snail shells were ready to go on exhibition on my wide windowsill in my bedroom, above the porch of our semi-detached in King’s Close.

Once, I went to the Chinnor Hills and found dozens of ancient calcified snails. I wasn’t sure if they were snails or fossils but they were included in my collection – white and powdered - creatures from another time.

The old molluscs piqued my interest and soon my collection of snail shells was joined by some fossils that I dug up in our back garden – ammonites and belemnites - belemnites mainly. Soon I was looking for fossils wherever I went - and the space on my windowsill grew smaller and smaller. I found fossilised mollusc shells on the beach on holiday, and a fragment of trilobite in a field nor far from where I lived. Pride of place went to a fossilised fish, all bones and an eye, which I saved up and bought mail order.

For a while I collected bits of clay pipe also excavated from our back garden. Some had ornate stems and bowls with faces moulded into them. Once I found a whole pipe, with only a slight crack in the base of the bowl.

In those days comics were full of advertisements for stamps, and the local newsagent, ‘Castles’, sold stamp books. For my eighth birthday my uncle Charlie gave me a stamp collector’s book, a small packet of transparent stamp hinges, and ‘fifty assorted stamps from around the world’. I was soon a keen collector and had stamps from Togo, Italia, Nordsk, Quatar, Great Britain (of course) and just about everywhere else in the Commonwealth and beyond. I even had a facsimile of a penny black and a real (heavily franked) two penny red.

I used to spend hours carefully folding and licking the far too thin mounting hinges, attaching them carefully to the back of my stamps, and gingerly mounting them in the pre-printed dotted lined squares in my stamp collecting book. I lusted after the ‘approval books’ that stamp companies advertised in my comics so badly that it made me feel sick, all you had to do was send them a stamped address envelope and they’d send you back a long, thin book (about the size of a pound note) with complete sets of stamps on every page for you to purchase.

I'd to dream of sending for one, and one day I couldn’t contain my lust any longer – so I forged my mum’s signature on the application slip. You had to have your parent’s permission to apply and I knew my dad would never agree - they were too expensive - and if saw the stamps - I’d want them - and I knew we couldn’t afford it. Two weeks later the book of stamps (total purchase cost ten pounds) arrived. I was excited and appalled. I’d got away with it! They’d sent me the approval book and all the stamps it contained!

I told my Mum that I’d won a stamp competition and that this was my prize - and she believed me!

I looked through the ten pages of carefully mounted stamps - it was almost a religious experience…a trio of triangular stamps from Mauritius – red, green, mauve, for five shillings…five rectangular air mail stamps from the Ivory Coast depicting bi-planes, tri-planes, and propeller driven beauties flying above elephant and crocodile filled jungles for six shillings and sixpence…and (most coveted of all ) a collection of fifteen stamps from Iceland all showing the same exploding geyser, but in such a range of colours and hues - all for an incredibly expensive ten shillings!

The stamps were mine ‘on approval’ for two weeks.

Three weeks later I still had them. Four weeks ran into five, then six, eight, and ten – I couldn’t send them back – and I certainly couldn’t afford the ten pounds to buy them. With every envelope pushed through the letterbox (by Cyril the postman) I expected a ‘demand’ letter. Every rap at the door was the representative from the ‘World Stamp Trading Company’ coming to ask for payment, or even worse, the local police. It was awful. I was in terror.

I hid the approval book in one of my ‘Arthur Mee’ encyclopaedias (volume seven out of ten I think –I only had nine) and pushed it far against the back wall under my bed. At night I lay awake certain that I’d soon be caught as the thief and liar that I was.

Two years later I stopped worrying, dragged the encyclopaedia out from under my bed, and nonchalantly stuck the stamps in my stamp book – by this time I’d moved onto coin collecting anyway.

My uncle Len had a milk round and at weekends and through the holidays I’d help him to deliver milk to the small villages around the market town where we lived. Some people used to leave the milk money by the side of the empties, and one old lady seemed to always pay with Victorian coins. I took to carrying the money Uncle Len paid me in my pocket and swapping the Victorian coins with my wages. Soon I had a large collection of ‘bun’ pennies and dozens of the older Victorian pennies, all dark and weathered with use. I had sixpences, shillings, florins, half crowns – even a silver three-penny piece mistakenly left out for a sixpence.

I bought a coin collectors book and began to look out for rarities – I found ‘H’ pennies, Georgian sixpences, Edwardian copper thrupenny bits, even a George V florin with Britannia standing up and not sitting.

I collected coins for years, eventually diversifying into collecting foreign coins. I bought five Churchill crowns and a Mexico Olympics commemorative coin. Then one day I just gave up. I think it was around the time that I started to collect girls. Bad mistake that, it turned out to be very expensive.

Over the years I’ve collected enamel metal signs, cigarette cards, beer mats, wooden cigarette dispenser boxes, antique glass bottles, screen printed cover children’s books, black and white woodcut book illustrations, old sweetie tins, ceramic cats (over a hundred) snow globes (over two hundred), and most recently pebbles (thousands).

Most of my collections are long gone. I remember coming home from school one day to find my collection of over a hundred and thirty-two blown bird eggs (including a huge Swan’s egg, only slightly cracked, that I’d picked up from the side of a river where it’d been dumped) mysteriously removed from the cotton wool lined chest of drawers, that stood in the shed, where I carefully kept them. They’d been replaced by a collection of rusty screwdrivers, hammers, spanners and rasps – I have no idea where my beautiful eggs went, but I often think of them and the fun that I had collecting them - and I only took the cold ones.

I still collect, but these days my collections are more random, less driven. A few of the old things still gather dust around the house, but I hardly notice them. These day my collections are more cerebral and less tangible. These days my collections are mainly memories. I find them, polish them, and put them out on display.

And you’ve just read one of my collections - my recollections – thanks.