ABSTRACT
Liverpool, once a vital English seaport lying across the River Mersey from my birthplace in Cheshire’s Wirral Peninsula, housed in my childhood some large department stores. Despite or maybe even to compensate for the many privations during the Second World War, my mother would regularly take me to visit the clothing departments. All I remember, as a 3-year-old, is obsessively collecting pins randomly discarded on the carpeted floors, doubtless to my mother’s embarrassment – unless of course they went into her prized sewing repository, to join assorted buttons, tapes and other such useful paraphernalia of repair or construction in a period of great privation. But I think it was simply the urge to collect that probably drove me – a simple urge perhaps like graffiti, divorced from any subsequent aesthetic or utilitarian purpose. Later, as a 4- or 5-year-old, I specialised in collecting bus tickets, thrilling, I well remember, to such rare exotica as the spoils of a journey on an obscure local bus line somewhere deep in rural Wales during a family holiday. These particular tickets were rectangular, prized specimens with two smaller rectangles excised at diagonally opposite ends. It was a natural progression to stamp collecting, which had a number of advances, and advantages, compared to bus tickets. They were of a largely standard shape and size (although spiced with such rare and delectable prizes as the occasional round or triangular specimen, usually from some utterly obscure island country, seeking fame and financial fortune via philately as a last resort); stamps moreover could also be displayed by mounting in special albums with stamp hinges, and were eagerly traded among one’s peers, or given as bribery or rewards by those in authority. Indeed, amidst the debris and junk of juvenilia, I still have my old stamp album, together with that of a friend, swapped for a large box of luscious if ephemerally shiny brown ‘conkers’, or horse chestnuts, which my favourite uncle had sent me. Graham’s mother, son in tow, hot-footed it round to demand that the swap be annulled, but my mother, strangely, took my side; she asked Graham which he preferred; when he replied ‘the conkers’, 193the album stayed with me and the two mothers never spoke to each other again, although Graham and I remained friends. He even threw in a combination lock, to seal the deal, which has served me well for some 70 years.
