The Collector
Going to my grandmother’s house was always something of an adventure. Not just because of where she lived, which was - or at least felt like it was - in the middle of nowhere. To reach her house we would get in dad’s car which rattled its way down winding oak-lined lanes behind which flat farmland stretched out to the coast and the sand plains of Southport, across an unmanned level crossing (which always carried with it an added sense of trepidation as there were no barriers, just a clanging bell and flashing lights to alert us to impending collision with a train full of daytrippers), down a narrow, twisty slope to cross a weir that would flood occasionally, then back up, then past a windmill or two before arriving at her cottage.
No, the adventure was more about what we would find when we got to her house. Technically, I suppose these days she would be classed as a hoarder, but the house was never like those you see on the television with rooms piled high with pointless peripherals, rotting food, a sock that has neither been worn nor washed since the 1950s, half a rat … There was order in my grandmother’s house. Loads of stuff, yes, piles and piles of it, but at least it was in order, and there was a definite point to it. My cousins described her as “eccentric”, which is possibly a gentle way of describing someone who is losing the plot. Grandmother wasn’t losing the plot, but neither was she conventional.
My grandmother was an avid reader, and bought books by the dozen. She kept the books on an array of different bookshelves, which lined every wall in every room except the kitchen, all higgledy-piggledy as there was no planning to the storage - she would just run out of space, visit a local jumble sale, and buy the biggest available bookcase they had on offer. To look at the bookshelves was a visual nightmare. There was no colour co-ordination, no thought to height or thickness and the impact this might have on the overall aesthetic. Not even any logical categorisation; it looked as though these hundreds, thousands of books were just randomly dumped, symptoms of a chaotic mind.
However, this was not true. Indeed, my grandmother had a very specific logic. The logic started in the upstairs bedroom that had once been the bedroom of my dad (but, also, her own bedroom as a child), then next to it was that of his sister when she was born, then next to that their brother when he arrived, then winding along the landing and into the hall, into the front ‘sitting’ room, the dining room, then the back ‘living’ room before ending in the hall. Moving clockwise around each room from the doorway, the shelves contained every single book my grandmother had bought in chronological order of purchase. This was her logic: the books, she said, were her life story. You could pick a book at random and she would be able to tell you how old she was when she bought it, where she had bought it (with 90% accuracy) and what was going on in her world and the wider world at the time she bought it.
It wasn’t just books she kept though. In the now redundant bedrooms were piled high dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes, all containing collections of things that were important to her. The prized collection of Readers Digest could be found in several boxes stacked neatly in one corner, carefully positioned to create cardboard corridors within the room that were sturdy enough to not topple; across the gangway another stack containing every single copy of the Radio Times she had bought. Another box or six might contain postcards from places she had visited and holidayed at. Others still contained letters from cousins, friends, people she had met on holiday, some girl she had struck up a conversation with in the queue for an ice cream at Camber Sands in the 1920s … All of this, she said, was her life; her memories, prompts for when the day came that she lost her marbles and couldn’t remember anything.
I suppose it was inevitable then that my dad would inherit this gene, although thankfully my grandfather’s DNA managed to dilute it somewhat. Dad’s collections were more manageable, and possibly sufficiently socially acceptable enough to not have him marked as ‘eccentric’ or, as his mother would say without any hint of irony, “one of those weirdos”. He collected cigarette cards even though he didn’t smoke, of footballers and cricketers and, perhaps not surprisingly given the copious amounts of tea drunk in our family, the cards that came in packets of Brooke Bond tea. It helped that Mr. Prince, who lived across the back street from us, had a job in the packing factory for them and he was able to secure the collection books and the odd bundle of cards to support the habit.
Mum didn’t mind this level of collecting. She could see there was a point to it, and because the collections were all properly housed and cared for and, perhaps significantly, could fit together in boxes that could go up in the loft, out of sight. She didn’t mind either that Dad tried to pass down the love of collecting to me. He tried with stamps, but I really couldn’t be doing with those irritating bits of adhesive plastic that folded back on themselves to mount a small square of perforated paper which had what might be a lovely picture on it obliterated by a dirty black postmark into a book that told me that what I had just held was of valuable historical interest. The first set of stamps of Elizabeth II’s reign? Excuse me whilst I stifle a yawn. He tried with coins too, but they just made my hands feel grubby and it was difficult to keep them in any order. Sometimes I would get out the huge old coffee tin in which he kept them and empty it out onto the carpet - usually when Mum wasn’t there so she wouldn’t see the mess I made on the carpet; there were still rogue coffee grounds in the tin after thirty years - then sort them into chronological order, or country of origin. I would have to be very bored to do that though.
I did, however, begin to collect stickers when I got older. I must have been in my early teens when Smash Hits launched a sticker collection. They were probably inspired by the Panini football stickers that the boys at school collected although, much as I loved football, it was difficult for a girl to get engaged in the swap system for duplicates. I always knew I was getting mugged off; even though I knew that the rarity value of a Trevor Francis was worth at least four Raith Rovers double player stickers, I’d only ever be allowed to swap on a one-for-one basis. Consequently my collections were always incomplete and I remained unfulfilled. With the Smash Hits stickers I was at least able to trade on a level playing field, as both boys and girls were collecting them. This included my older cousin, Lucinda.
Lucinda was Dad’s sister’s eldest daughter, and despite Dad being the eldest of the siblings I was the youngest of the cousins. Lucinda was four years older than me, and was not unknown to pull rank if she needed to. One spring - it must have been Easter - we went to stay with them in their big house in the Yorkshire Dales. My collection of stickers was almost complete. So too was Lucinda’s. I think she had five left to get, whilst I had twenty one. At the back of the sticker book was an address you could write off to to get any stickers you were missing, by sending a postal order or a cheque. However you were limited to a maximum of, well, it must have been twenty; I suggested you could write off with two different names but Lucinda said they would check the address and you would just lose your money.
Thinking about it now, I seem to remember she had said that after we had looked through each others’ swaps, and she knew she had one of the stickers I was missing whilst I had all five of her ‘want’s. Which meant she could complete her collection there and then and I would have to wait. I thought the exchange would be easy, not least because she would be getting five stickers and only surrendering one of her own duplicates. I watched as Lucinda gleefully peeled off Nik Kershaw, the left half of the Thompson Twins, Chaka Khan, Howard Jones, then a Spandau Ballet full band sticker, and placed them with relish into her sticker book before closing it with a slam of satisfaction and dancing around the room cheering her completist success. I waited for the celebrations to subside, before gently enquiring if I could have her Johnny Marr sticker, the one I needed to take me to the twenty-left threshold and the only one I needed that she had in her duplicates.
It was almost as if I had asked her to defecate and eat her own bodily creation warmed up in custard. Good god no, she said, I couldn’t have that. I didn’t like the Smiths, she said (I did, but that was clearly beside the point) and anyway she had promised it to Sean Graham from church who said he would take her to McDonalds if she let him have it and it would be unChristian of her to go back on a promise. I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach. I felt as though I had been betrayed, which was also unChristian. Lucinda maintained that she never agreed that I could have the sticker, and that she thought I was happy to just let her have my swaps because I didn't need them. I considered telling Dad, but he would just have had a row with his sister and then the whole weekend would have been ruined for everyone, not just me.
Not that the weekend was ruined for me - that sounds a bit over-dramatic. It has stuck with me for a long time though, and not because I didn’t get the sticker. Because I did get the sticker. When we were packing up to leave at the end of the weekend, I was duly dispatched back upstairs to check I hadn’t left anything behind. It turned out I had … I decided I had left behind a sticker of Johnny Marr, one I must have left somewhere towards the middle of a five-centimetre-high pile of Lucinda’s swaps. I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans, and when I got home I stuck it carefully in its rightful place between Morrissey and Andy Rourke, before making a note of the remaining twenty vacant slots, getting Mum to write a cheque and posting off to secure my own completion.
I didn’t quite feel the same elation as displayed by Lucinda when the stickers arrived, and the final sticker placement left me feeling somewhat empty. In a later phone call I remember Dad telling Mum that Lucinda had been really angry with me because some boy called Sean had dumped her for Andrea Smith and it was because I had stolen one of her stickers. Mum said she must be mistaken, because she knew she had written a cheque when I sent off for the last few stickers to complete my book. I am not sorry that taking the sticker meant Lucinda didn’t get to go out with Sean. She knew the deal, and as far as I can see (and still do; sorry if you’re reading this Lucinda - I love you and you’ve been a great cousin over the years, but, come on - YOU KNEW!) she reneged on it. However, I stooped to her level of deviousness and acted in a way that could be described as unChristian, and for that I am sorry.
Text and images copyright John Hartley 2025
