If,
like the Poet, the Philatelist is born not
made then am I a "born"
philatelist, for
from a very early age
did the "craze," as
anti-stampists love
to term it, lay hold on
me. As a
boy of eight I used to
accompany my
father to his place of
business every
Saturday. All the clerks,
with the exception
of two or three, were
religiousJews
and consequently did not
work on the
Saturday and so I was in no
one's way as I wandered here and there
through the office poking my hands into
every waste paper basket and dirt barrel
and detaching from envelopes and
wrappers
the pretty pieces of coloured
papers which
had paid the postage-duty
on letters from
different lands. The
stamps thus found I
took home with me
and pasted into
an ordinary 1/- exercise
book, devoting a
page to each country.
This book I still
have, and find that the
crest and flag
(obtained from the B. O. P.)
of each
country adorns the top right and
left
hand corners, and under each stamp
I
wrote the date of issue, watermark, and
other particulars which the then
catalogues could
give me.
| No one in the office collected, in fact, the collectors in
Kingston in those days could have been
counted on the fingers of both
hands
and there would have been fingers
still
to spare, so I had it all my own
sweet
way, and many was the good stamp,
West
Indian especially, for the firm dealt
largely
with the islands, that I saved
from an untimely ending and a grave
in the West End. By
the time I was sent to a boys'
school, the dear old Collegiate of Radcliffe
and Morrison fame, I had a very fair
collection indeed. A few of my school
mates
collected and among them I did
some exchanging stamp for stamp, and purchasing. Many is the day I cheerfully
parted with my lunch money to buy a
stamp
instead. Even as a beginner, and
every
youthful beginner is a generalist,
and, may
be it is wise that it should be so, my likes
and dislikes for
certain countries were very
pronounced. There were some places,
Russia, Germany, to
instance two, which,
although I kept, I
simply detested and never
worried over too much; there were others,
Jamaica, Hayti,
America, for example, which
appealed
to my heart and soul, and on these,even then, I spent most of my spare
cash. When, as a lad of 18, I left
school, I owned a really fine
general collection.
|
