WHEN I WAS A SMALL CHILD in the 1940s, in a provincial town at the bottom of Australia, there existed in my life a book called The Journey of the Stamp Animals. It was the story of four Australian animals who somehow got off the stamps on which they were printed, and set out on a long and difficult pilgrimage—destination forgotten (by me).
Their travels were irresistibly complicated by the fact that each animal was able to eat only things which were the same colour as the stylised stamp-picture of itself that it had escaped from: the kangaroo could eat only yellow things; the sheep, mauve; and so on. (The ’roo could feast on butter, but the poor sheep had to keep searching for obscure things like wisteria, a plant I had not at that stage heard of.)
The book had wonderful illustrations. Most of all I pored over a picture of the Foxy Roadhouse, a sort of nightclub where foxes went to dance. The four stamp animals, timid creatures with no experience of the world, had to creep past this wicked establishment, whose open doors let fall across the pavement a strip of smoky light. Inside the building, glamorous vixens in tiaras and plunging-necked cocktail gowns were twirling about in the arms of their tuxedoed, snarling partners; and all the foxes’ clothes must have had special holes cut at the back, for out of their skirts and trousers gushed great, curved, furry tails. It was an image—sexual, sinister, intensely metropolitan—which thrilled me, as I lay on my bed in my sensible cotton pyjamas, in the humble town of Geelong beside its quiet bay.
But here’s the really weird part: except for members of my immediate family, no Australian I’ve mentioned the book to, in subsequent years, has had any knowledge of it whatsoever. I used to ask people about it all the time, but everyone looked blank. I started to think I must have dreamt it, or that it was a figment of my family’s fantasy of itself.
Then ten years ago I wrote a little piece about childhood books for Vogue magazine in which I mentioned the mysterious stamp animals and the deep effect they’d had on me. Soon the magazine forwarded to me a letter in trembly writing from an old woman living in a suburb of Sydney. Her granddaughter had spotted my article and brought her the cutting. Her name was Phyllis Hay. She was excited: she wanted me to know that she was the writer of the book.
It existed! A real Australian person had written it! I was shocked. We corresponded. I asked if she had a spare copy. She said she had only one left, but would lend it to me if I promised to return it. In due course it arrived. I hardly dared to open it. But when I did, out of its battered pages flowed in streams, uncorrupted, the same scary joy it had brought me as a child, before everything in my life had happened. The wisteria was as mauve and as hard to reach, the stamp animals as sweet and determined, the foxes’ tails as erotically forceful as I had remembered them. I gloried in the book and in the vindication of my memories. Regretfully, at length, I posted it back.
I heard from its author only once more. She wrote again to tell me that, on the strength of my recommendation, she had suggested to the publisher that they might reissue the book. She was sad to tell me that they had shown no interest at all.
Since then I’ve found that the library at Sydney University has a copy. I could take a bus and a train and another bus and go and read it—handle it, smell it, look at it—any time I liked. But I never do. I don’t want to. I want The Journey of the Stamp Animals to be an eternal secret between me and its writer. I don’t know if she’s still alive. I even managed to keep forgetting her name. Her book is one of those treasures of memory that I have to keep in its own little box, in case it leaks away.