Penny Black Stories

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I first met Nigel at one of the meetings of my local Philatelic Society. The invited speaker from somewhere down south was displaying Indian States. It didn't really arouse my interest - the speaker insisted on talking through every sheet, repeating almost verbatim the words he had written on each one. The members were growing increasingly bored and it was a relief when he finished and we were able to get up and look at the stamps.

It was just by chance that I happened to be next to Nigel when we were looking at some sheets of Cochin issues. One sheet included a large, legal sized cover that didn't quite fit within the transparent protector. He leaned forward and gently touched the protruding edge of the cover. For a few seconds he stood transfixed in front of the sheet. Then his face distorted into a picture of sheer pain. I grabbed his arm.

"Are you all right?" I enquired.

"Yes ... yes!" He stuttered. "But this man died a violent death."

I don't think any other members noticed the incident. The room was hot and stuffy, and I put this strange behaviour down to a temporary lack of oxygen. I wouldn't have thought any more about it myself if I hadn't happened to see an unusual display from Nigel at our annual members' evening that year. The display was of some fairly ordinary Victorian covers mainly from Great Britain, but others from Commonwealth countries around the world. Each was written up with a short story about the writer or the recipient of the letter. They showed remarkable research into the lives of the individuals concerned. One perfectly ordinary letter to a lady in Hampstead revealed that she was a murder victim, whilst another to a young man in Manchester recorded that he died whilst on an expedition to discover the source of the Amazon River.

One or two members were sceptical, and challenged him about the routes he had described some of the letters as taking, especially where there was no evidence on the envelopes showing they had travelled by those routes.

"How can you know this was carried by the Railway Post Office?" Queried one of our venerated members pointing to one of the covers. "It carries no marking to show that."

"My research shows it to be so," Nigel replied. "On that particular trip the mail clerk was too drunk to cancel the mail." But he wouldn't be drawn further on the subject.

How had Nigel come by this intriguing information I wondered? What had led him to research these particular letters in such detail from the thousands of ordinary letters that were available to him?

I happened to visit a stamp fair the following week and saw Nigel at one of the dealers' stands. I watched him as he thumbed through a box of early covers. I noticed that he held each cover gently between his thumb and forefinger before passing on to the next. Unlike the normal collector he seemed to pay no attention to the cover itself - he hardly looked at the stamp or the address, and never turned the covers over to look for markings on the back. When I moved alongside him I realised why. All the time he was thumbing through the covers he had his eyes closed!

And then he suddenly stiffened. His face distorted in pain and he opened his eyes. He stared hard and long at the cover he held, and slowly put it to one side before resuming his "inspection" of the remaining covers. He finished going through the covers in the box, but apparently found nothing else of interest. He presented the single cover to the dealer who looked at it and accepted fifty pence for it. I looked and saw it was a rather tatty George VI cover used in Great Britain.

As he turned from the dealer's stand I walked in front of him.

"Hello Nigel! Found anything of interest?" I asked.

"Hello Penny. Nothing really. Just a cover I think may have been addressed to a man who died in the blitz."

My curiosity was aroused.

"How can you possibly tell that from simply touching the cover?" I asked.

Maybe it was the way I phrased the question, but Nigel looked decidedly uneasy.

"Can we have a quiet word?" He asked.

We went to the refreshments area and I bought a cup of coffee and took it to the table Nigel had chosen. He was already seated there having said he didn't want a coffee.

"No. Not if you'd prefer I didn't," I replied.

"It's just that I don't want to go through it all again," he said.

"I understand," I lied, not sure what he meant. "You want to keep it a secret."

"That's it," he said. "That's just right. I couldn't stand the pressure I had down in London. Not again. It would drive me mad."

"It might help me to appreciate the pressure you were under if you tell me about it," I said.

He looked intently at me, and I could see the turmoil within him. His eyes were looking deep into another place far removed from our table.

"You've probably guessed I have this gift," he said. "I can see things that other people can't. I first noticed it when I was a young boy. We had a picture of my grandmother on the mantle-shelf. She was still alive then. One day I looked and she had disappeared from the picture. It was just a photograph of the chair she had been sitting in. I didn't understand it until my mum came home in tears and said Grandma was dead."

He paused, overcome by the memory of the incident.

I nodded, pretending to understand. It was getting rather unreal, and I wasn't sure where it was all leading.

"Over the years," he continued, "I've discovered that I can touch things and see what has happened to them in the past. Sometimes I only need to look at them to know, but usually that's for things that are part of my own life. Mostly I need to touch them to see what has happened to the person that the object belonged to. I'm not sure how it happens, but it's a bit like having a women pass you with a strong smelling scent?"

Nigel noticed my puzzled look.

"Well, even after she's passed by you the scent lingers in the air. You can smell it. You can still imagine she's there. So it is with my understanding about past events. I can't explain why, but they leave a scent trail which I can smell even after they have passed by many years before. I can see what happened, and see the past from the trail they leave for me when I touch something that belonged to them."

I'm a bit of a sceptic, and like evidence before I believe anything that appears impossible. I needed to probe deeper into Nigel's strange confession.

"So, what happened in London?" I asked.

"A couple of members there found out about my gift, and insisted I helped them with their researches into the antecedents of some of the covers they owned. But it all went terribly wrong. One of the members gave me a cover written by his father. I saw things I couldn't divulge. For one thing I saw his father had made his money by the fraudulent use of worthless stocks, causing at least two people to commit suicide rather than face bankruptcy. The other member gave me some family correspondence as well. I discovered he was the illegitimate son of a Duke, but thought his father was a successful shopkeeper. How could I tell these people the truth? I became the keeper of unwanted secrets. It became an unbearable burden."

"Yes," I said, "it must have been a difficult time for you."

"Now I only use my gift to detect unusual covers for myself," said Nigel.

We sat in silence for a while as I sipped my coffee.

I pulled out a cover from the small bag I was carrying. "I've just bought this," I said. "I'd appreciate your opinion on it. Is it genuine do you think?"

Nigel took the cover. His whole body became rigid. I saw sweat break out on his forehead. His lips started to turn blue. His breathing became erratic and he found it difficult to catch his breath.

I called for help and somebody dialled for an ambulance.

They took him away but he died in hospital the next day. A heart attack they said. He was at that vulnerable age.

I still have the cover he handled just before his heart attack. It's a cover postmarked Berlin, April 1945 and addressed to Adolf Hitler at the Chancellery. It bears a manuscript endorsement on the back in German reading "Two more Divisions ordered to the Russian Front - we must show them no mercy," in what I believe to be Hitler's own hand. Somehow I think it's genuine.