I started to write yesterday, but was interrupted by my husband coming home prematurely. And now it is lost somewhere in the murky depths of my computer. But things have a strange way of turning up unexpectedly.
These days, whenever I start loosing things, or rather failing to find them because they are no longer in the place where I had thought I had put them, I realise that it is time to have a bit of a sort out. I did this with my bookshelves in the spare room the other day, and lo and behold, what should turn up but my old stamp album.
I sat down on top of the pile of books on the floor and perused it. I had carefully stuck those stamps in country by country, set by set, all in nice straight rows. The late King George features in ten of my stamps, ranging in value from a ha'pny to tuppence ha'pny(as we used to pronounce it) I've even got three with the head of his abdicated older brother, Edward. I used to like the stamps of the young queen Elizabeth best. A whole set of stamps with her young portrait on them graces my album. As I said in my last Blog - It is pity that everyone, even queens, have to get old.
South African stamps used to come in pairs, one with Suid (pronounce sayed) Africa, and the other with South Africa. Zimbabwe was southern Rhodesia in those days, and on that page, I have four stamps of English currency, with the Queen's head on them, and the writing, Rhodesia and Nyasaland (which I believe is present-day Malawi) We used to have a gardener from Malawi when we live out in South Africa, and his name was Maxwell. How he managed to work so hard in that sticky, summer heat, I do not know. But that belongs to a much later chapter of my life and has absolutely no place under the present title.
For pure pictorial beauty, the stamps of Monaco and Hungary were hard to beat. I've got a couple which celebrate the wedding of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, as well as some lovely triangular ones from that principality. I remember watching the fairy-tale wedding on our small black and white television (already described in great detail in an earlier Blog) when the American actress became a princess. In hindsight, she would have probably been happier if she had stayed in America, where she belonged, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Visiting her tomb in Monaco's great cathedral was a sad experience for me. I was still feeling very subdued when I emerged once more into the sunshine. One day she was a princess, the next a corpse. What is life and death all about?
I don't know why the Hungarians made a point of producing such lovely stamps back in the fifties. Perhaps that was one area in which their Russian oppressors (or liberators, depending on ones point of view) let them have free rein and give vent to their pent-up creativity. Anyway, I used to love collecting them. and they had pride of placein my stamp album.
I remember when I was about seven, my mother's older sister came to visit us for the afternoon. In winter, she used to remind me of a big brown bear, with her long fur coat, fur boots and fur mittens. she even used to wear the furry, sanitized remains of some unfortunate elongated creature round her neck, bright,beady eyes shining and its tail clipping somehow into its mouth. My aunt Agnes used to fascinate me in more ways than one. She was a brilliant conversationist with a witty sense of humour, and even at that age she used to make me laugh. Anyway, on this particular visit, I must have been briefly the subject of the conversation. Directly I heard my name mentioned I started to pay attention to what was being said, as one does. "Why doesn't Josephine start collecting stamps. It is a very educational hobby."
So sure enough, a few days after this visit I got a pile of used stamps complete with parts of the envelopes they were still stuck to, and instructions about how to soak them off in a saucer of tepid water. I believe a packet of stamp hinges and a very small, album was included in the bounty.
My new hobby kept me occupied for hours one end. For the rest of my childhood, quite a sizeable chunk of my meagre pocket money would be spent on stamps, and I suppose I absorbed the rudiments of geography along the way. I began to realise that Australia and Austria were two different countries and that Jugoslavia could be spellt Yugoslavia as well. I learned that the French owned a place that had beautiful stamps called Camaroons and that the Seychelles were tiny islands in the middle of the Indian ocean, with lots of birds.
I remember one stamp, no longer in my possession, a small, green one that had 'Saar' on it. I really did not know where to stick it, so it had a special place in the back of my album. Years later, when learning about the Rhine Valley at secondary school, a small black dot, denoting 'coal' had to be put in, somewhat to the south of the Ardennes. This was Saarland, where my green stamp had originated. Little did I know at that time, that I would later spend the best part of thirteen years there.
We used to have fun swapping stamps at school and in each other's houses. Everybody seemed to collect stamps in those days. And dare I say, our knowledge of the kind of geography as to where countries and continents were, and what was the capital of what, was far superior to that of kids today. I put a lot of that down to stamp collecting.
As for me personally, Geography was one of the subjects that I always seemed to come top in, in secondary school, without really trying. I had a good pictorial memory, so I could remember maps and graphs fairly easily, but the main reason was, that my curiousity about our big wide world had been nurtured and nourished sufficiently during my formative impressionable years. And in this, my hobby of stamp collecting had definitely played its part.







We used fiddly bits of specially gummed paper called stamp-hinges, to stick them in.