Strange memories

I was looking for something today and felt impelled to look inside the stamp album that was sitting in the way - an album that I've always known was there, that I usually pick up and return carefully without looking at it. But the moment I opened it I was 7 again, sitting up in bed with one of the many ailments (measles, perhaps?) that the first child in the family tends to fall heir to, or did in the day of minimal vaccination. (I did, on the other hand, have three different vaccinations for smallpox, but there you are ...)

The page of stamps from Germany is particularly fascinating. I can remember my father explaining why these overprinted stamps at the start of the third row on the left hand page had these absurdly high values - 100 thousand, 200 thousand, 1 million, stamps reflecting the inflation that drove Germany into the hands of the Nazi ideology that ruined the country and resulted in the deaths of more than I know the number of. 

And then there are the stamps with the familiar profile of Hitler. Sensible prices. Germany must have been great again by then. Sound familiar? 

I grew up in a post-war household. My father had served in the RAF in the Western Desert; the bombing was still very real in the memory of my mother who had remained in Glasgow throughout. I was nervous of the flight from Paris to Renfrew Airport when it flew over my house at 8pm; I used to imagine a bomb screaming down, destroying the Hyndland tenements, burying us in the rubble. You can tell by this inexpert album that I was still very young when I was sticking in the stamps, but I knew about Hitler, Nazis, desperation.

And looking at this brings it all back. And I can't bear the thought that we might head this way again. Ever.