Texts for Translation 2011:
  Ian Ferguson

FOREIGN POSTING

Ian Ferguson © 2011

Oliver had finally given in to his wife’s constant reminders and so found himself this particular Sunday afternoon in the unfloored and poorly-lit attic of their four-bedroom villa, bent double, and balancing precariously on two-inch wide joists wearing ridiculously inadequate footwear, one slip away from puncturing a slipper-shaped hole in the ceiling directly above the marital bed.

She had been at him for some time to clear out the paraphernalia which had gathered in the loft space and had lain practically untouched since they’d moved in some ten years earlier. “Clearing out the loft is a job for winter,” he’d said in a smug tone as he sipped his gin and tonic and stretched out on a lounger to enjoy the warmth of that summer’s Sunday sun. As he lay there soaking up the rays and the clear bitter-sweet spirit, winter had seemed so remote. Now, with a fresh sprinkling of glistening snow on the lawn outside, he was reaping what he’d sown.

Having spent almost the entire day in the dusk of the chilly and depressing attic he began a disinterested rummage through the contents of the final cardboard box, one of at least two-dozen cartons full of the detritus he and his wife had hoarded in the mistaken belief that it would some day prove useful. He removed them item-by-kitschy-item shaking his head at their tawdriness. A floral-patterned teapot was followed by two tarnished, ornate silver candle-holders, a gold-plated carriage clock (not ticking), a twenty-four piece dinner service in another floral pattern, and lastly, incongruous with the rest, a forty-five revolutions per minute vinyl recording of ‘Red Sails In The Sunset’ by The Platters.

Oliver inventoried each item on a lined A5 notepad taking care to follow his wife’s meticulous instructions. She’d gone over them twice to make sure they’d sunk into his notoriously vacuous memory which she’d always said gave all self-respecting sieves a bad name. She’d informed him to carefully log each item with a reasonable assessment of its condition whereupon she would make a decision on its fate from a range of options: a) bring it into everyday use, b) car-boot sale, c) charity shop, d) disposal, or e) pass it down to a less fortunate relative or friend.

Having assessed one hundred and seven items over the course of the day, Oliver was approaching a near-vegetative state when he noticed an object at the base of this final cardboard box wrapped in a faded, yellowing newspaper. He peeled off the front page of a Daily Record from the twenty-fourth of October in the year nineteen seventy-three and was amazed to discover a once much-loved possession from his childhood: his long-forgotten stamp album.

He opened the cover and instantly recognised his own nine-year old handwriting and a goose-pimpled nostalgia washed over him. How he’d loved those pre-pubescent, rainy afternoons poring over his collection, attaching stamps from distant exotic lands or simply gazing at the images from countries he could only dream of visiting. Oliver decided this needed closer inspection but he needed more light so he tip-toed like a high-wire acrobat towards the loft doorway’s shaft of light which pierced the gloom and illuminated the frantic movement of the dust particles he disturbed as he moved.

Oliver remembered with amusement just how fervently he’d loved this hobby as a youngster. He recalled the lost hours where in his imagination he would wander through the countries depicted on those tiny adhesive shapes, where he became part of their story, their history. In those daydreams he’d be an intrepid explorer making contact with unknown tribes in the dark humid rainforests of South America, in another he was an archaeologist in ancient Egypt painstakingly unearthing relics of global importance, in yet another he’d be an East-African National Reserve gamekeeper hunting down poachers hell-bent in their devotion to their cruel and illicit trade.

He stared at his album and was surprised at the sudden desire it rekindled for this rather socially-isolating hobby. He laughed out loud at the notion of admitting to those who knew him that he’d taken up this old pastime again.

“Dearest friends of mine, I have something to tell you,” he’d say. “I’m a philatelist.”

“You’re a what?” he heard them reply with revulsion. “You sick bastard! You should have your children taken away and put into care.”

Oliver would explain that this was not some kind of sexual deviancy involving minors or small burrowing animals, it was, quite simply, an innocent – if somewhat solitary and unfashionable – interest in modes of postage payment from around the world. Even then he feared their reaction would be much the same.

“You’re a stamp collector? You sick bastard! You should have your children taken away and put into care.”

He knew he would be tainted, the stigma remaining with him for the rest of his life. He’d be classed as a social miscreant who couldn’t be trusted, never invited to parties or out for a beer with the lads. He’d be doomed to spend the rest of his days holed up in the attic, sticking stamps to the pages of his album with new-fangled, self-adhesive hinges, his fingers trembling with the fevered anticipation of a new addition to the collection, tongue protruding from his mouth with the intense concentration, dribbling onto the pages of this once-precious tome. No! Oliver decided. This is one item I’m not going to itemise. He settled into a dusty bean-bag and began reading the first page.

It told him that this wasn’t just any common-or-garden album, this was the Stanley Gibbons STRAND Stamp Album: “For the Postage Stamps of the World.” Oliver smiled. If Carlsberg made stamp albums then this would probably have been it. Adding to the prestige of the album was the proud statement: “By Appointment to HM The Queen, Stanley Gibbons Ltd, Philatelists, London.” So now they had the Queen associated with Philately. Oliver smiled. He thought Stanley Gibbons was very brave to have advertised sexual deviancy in such a blatant manner, but what was worse, he had suggested that our Queen actually endorsed the practice!

The facing page had an index of every stamp-producing country, or at least as they had existed in 1969 when the album had been printed. The Foreword explained that an Identification Table was provided giving the local names for countries where they were “sufficiently unlike the English forms to cause perplexity.” Oliver wondered how unlike the English a country’s name would have to be to cause perplexity and scanned the index to find out.

One of the first names that intrigued him was Afars and Issas which the Identification Table stated was part of the French Somali Coast prior to Somalia gaining her independence in 1960. Further down the list was Heligoland. Oliver hadn’t realised that it was a country, he was sure he’d read a novel by that name, someone called Shena had written it. Shena Macsomething. Then there was Mafeking. He’d heard that used in the pub the previous night: “Haw you, that’s ma fecking pint.”

Some of the names reminded Oliver of the mental connections he’d made as a young stamp collector. He ran his right middle finger down the index. Ah! Mesopotamia, full of enormous hippopotami wallowing in glorious mud pools in the African bush. Osterreich, he’d imagined would be full of tall, gangling, flightless birds. Orange Free State, his father had rather unkindly informed him, was a small country in which Freemasons were prohibited, leaving Catholics to roam free, safe from sectarian poachers.

Then there were others which gave birth to his own grown-up images: Wrangel – he sensed that this must have been home to a race with which you would indulge in endless arguments should you ever decide to go there, wherever ‘there’ was; Stellaland – was this home to a colony of women called Stella who had evolved to the point where men were no longer needed?; Poouch – a reservation for marsupials created to protect them from extinction? Oliver saw that there were many others in this Identification Table like those including the curiously-titled, Thurn and Taxis, but sadly his sieve-like memory prevented him from recalling what colourful images these odd names had given rise to in his pre-adolescent imagination.

He turned the page to the first country – Afghanistan. He noticed at the top of the page there was a small section which briefly described the history, geography, economy, and politics of the country and decided that he was going to read through this wonderful discovery of his in the solitude of the attic, hoping that his wife wouldn’t notice that the stock-take had slowed down and indeed stopped completely. He resolved to re-educate himself with the information about the country, admire the stamps from that part of the world and revel in whatever memories that they brought to mind. His plan would include a regular and intermittent bouncing of the gold-plated carriage clock on a joist to create the impression that he was gainfully employed.

As a young person he’d had never collected any Afghan stamps, or indeed any Albanian ones, but he reasoned that stamps had probably been something of a luxury in these states. He could well imagine that an attempt to write a letter to someone on the outside could well have resulted in a public flogging or, at the very least, confiscation of the tongue that had wet the stamp or the hand that had attached it to the envelope.

Oliver riffled the pages. Algeria and Andorra were likewise bereft of any specimens (as the editor of the album had classed them.) Antigua was also a blank page as was the Ascension Islands, although Oliver thought that the name Ascension seemed to promise better things to come. And so it proved. Over leaf, Oliver encountered the first stamp still clinging valiantly to the page some thirty years from when it was first attached. It was from the Argentine Republic, had originally cost five centavos, and carried the bearded face of one Jose Hernandez. His importance to Argentina was lost on Oliver but he must have been important enough to have had his face on a postage stamp. The information at the top of the page informed him that the capital was Buenos Aires, there were one hundred centavos for every peso, and its chief products were meat, wool, hides and cereal. No mention of its great football team, thought Oliver.

He flicked briskly through the A’s noting that Osterreich was actually Austria and it didn’t have any tall, gangly, flightless birds on its stamps. Oliver read that it had been annexed by Germany in 1938 and therefore assumed that the Nazis had exterminated them on account of their big noses and lack of blond feathers.

The B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s had little of note to distinguish them, but while admiring his only Chilean stamp, he discovered that one of that country’s possessions was the Juan Fernandez Islands which was purportedly where Robinson Crusoe had been shipwrecked.

Moving North, Oliver arrived in France only to find that as a nine year-old he’d attached some sort of export quality stamp for ‘oeufs’. He now knew these to be eggs but he vaguely remembered thinking at the time that this was some island owned by the French Government. Oliver was disappointed that by comparison with the other French stamps on this page this was by far the most attractive, adorned as it was with striking red white and blue images of assorted ‘oeuf-laying’ fowl, a fluttering national flag and a very commendable representation of an emerald-green ocean as a backdrop. It was certainly more appealing to Oliver than the specimen beside it displaying an erect red-plumed cock.

Oliver had two full pages of German postage however they did nothing to excite him being rather politically and industrially focussed. The information above centred around the various wars that they’d started and subsequently lost so he flipped the pages to Great Britain. He was amazed by just how many British stamps he’d collected in his youth. There were dozens, so many of them depicting well-loved and famous characters, and also the Queen.

Amongst them were stamps dedicated to Alcock and Brown, the first pilots to fly non-stop across the Atlantic in 1919. Florence Nightingale, John Keats, and Robert Burns were all there as well as a fit and tanned Ben Kingsley looking suspiciously like Ghandi.

They shared the pages with stamps which celebrated famous historical and political events: Concorde’s inaugural flight, the invention of radar, and the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath 1320. “When I get the man who nicked my smokies, he’s dead!” thought Oliver.

He continued to riffle the pages and turning to Lebanon he was dumbfounded to discover a stamp from that country, not attached but lying loose and still stuck to a piece of the envelope on which it had obviously been sent. It had a Beirut postmark. Oliver tried to recall who could have given him such a stamp, but to no avail. There was still a part of the address on the small scrap of envelope but it was too faded for Oliver to make out. He contented himself by reading the information about the country at the top of the page. Oliver was informed that it was the Republic of Western Asia whose capital was indeed Beirut. The currency was 100 centimes to each piastre and it had been part of Turkish Levant until the 1914 – 18 War, after which it came under French mandate until independence was achieved in 1943. Stamps, it said, had been first issued in 1924. Oliver considered the current political unrest in that part of the world. He pondered just how unappealing a job as a postman would be in Beirut and vowed never again to grumble about his career.

Oliver noticed that nearly all of the pages of his album represented a country which could boast some world-influencing significance: the conquering of the Aztecs by Cortes in sixteenth century Mexico, the wonder of Mount Everest within the frontiers of Nepal, the discovery of New Zealand’s South Island by Abel Tasman in 1642 and the subsequent charting of the Islands by Captain Cook over a century later, the Pitcairn Islands occupied by ‘The Bounty’ mutineers in 1790, the magic carpets of Persia, apartheid in South Africa and more. Oliver arrived at United States of America, a country of great achievement, including Burger King, KFC, and that whining little shit of a mouse at Disneyland.

There were so many others that Oliver didn’t get the chance to ponder because his wife suddenly shouted up from somewhere within the bowel of the house.

“Are you still alive up there?”

“No,” he whispered.

He chastised himself for the insufficient frequency of his carriage clock-bouncing subterfuge. He shouted down to assure her that he was fine and that he’d almost complied with her wishes. He stared at the cover of his old album thankful to have found it after all these years and to have enjoyed an hour or so to himself poring over its contents with all of the memories it had restored. He carefully wrapped it in the yellowing newspaper and replaced it in the cardboard box from whence it came. He put the teapot, candle holders, carriage clock (complete with fresh dents), and the twenty-four piece tea service gently back on top. He slid ‘Red Sails In The Sunset’ in a narrow gap before sealing the box with duct tape. He carried it back into a dark corner of the attic.

The Stanley Gibbon’s Stamp Album would not appear on this, or any other, inventory. It was Oliver’s little secret. Another shout from below.

“Coming, darling of mine,” he whispered and began his descent back to reality.

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