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But in the dark, for certain, the truth was always there: it would never go away, it would only spread. She didn't tell me about it as I grew up and it grew harder. I'm sure if she had told my father he would have hastened her to hospital. It spread for two years, until its size, or the fear, or advice from others, compelled her to go to the experts.
    Of course this was in the days before routine scans and
Woman's Hour
Specials, the days where the patient felt themselves at fault, and with limited hope of survival after diagnosis. The blunt treatments—surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, the slash, burn and poison with which we have become sickeningly and unwillingly familiar—had improved markedly since my mother was young, but the prognosis of two or three friends had shown her how they sometimes delayed, seldom stabilised, never reversed. In the mid-1970s, ICI was just bringing tamoxifen to market, and, following her mastectomy, my mother was an early trialist.
    We stayed on in the big house after my father died, and my mother cared for her two sons and went to work as an assistant at an old-age home near Kenwood in north London. Jonathan and my father's friends helped her with the task of family administration—the bills, the insurance, the taxes, all that upsetting maelstrom from which she had remained insulated—and she became stronger and independent. The cancer retreated for a while.
    Her regular check-ups were held at the Middlesex Hospital in Mortimer Street, central London, some two hundred yards from the Post Office Tower. This was also the place I was born. From her consulting room you could see the restaurant revolve, though it had ceased to be open to the public since a bomb, probably planted by the Angry Brigade, exploded in a women's toilet in 1971. Following one consultation in the summer of 1976 we did what we always did—a trip to the Boulevard Restaurant in Wigmore Street for what they called an 'open' smoked salmon sandwich, in other words not a sandwich at all—and then we did something unusual: we did the Strand.
    My mum had no interest in stamps whatsoever, but the results of her blood tests had probably been good that day, and she was in an indulgent mood. I hadn't devoted much time to my collection for several years, and I still didn't have much money, but we were celebrating not only clear results but the end of my O levels and a downturn in the heatwave. I felt an expensive present coming on.
    Our first call was the post office in Trafalgar Square, the best philatelic counter in London. There were only new stamps on sale here, but the people behind the counter understood the collector's demands. They understood them a lot more than my mother did, and as we queued up I did my best to explain the latest thing in British stamps—gutter pairs.
    'Gutter pairs are when two stamps are separated by a strip of white paper. There are ten gutter pairs in every sheet of one hundred stamps, and the gutter, which is also perforated, runs down the middle of a sheet.'
    'What's the point of it?' she asked.
    She had me there. 'I think it has something to do with the printing process. Or the folding process.'
    'But what's the point of collecting them?'
    'The point is, they are rare. The early ones are getting very expensive, though I'm not sure why.'
    The man behind the counter didn't have much of an idea either, but he knew they were in great demand. The post office in Trafalgar Square was the only place in London I knew where they didn't sigh if you asked for particular strip or block of a stamp sheet. The person in the queue behind the person being served understood too, and never tutted when the wait was long. In fact, the Philatelic Bureau may have been the only queue in Britain where the person behind was genuinely interested in the business being transacted ahead. Ah, you collect cylinder blocks ... and traffic lights ... and blocks of four. An addict loves an addict.
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