People Like to Collect Disasters
Sticker books were all the rage when I was in upper Primary School. All my friends were collectors. We’d gather in the corner of the playground and arrange our doubles along the wall, negotiating our swaps and trades. Some stickers were harder to come by than others. We were normally all on the hunt for the same two or three. You could, if you were really desperate, send off for up to six stickers you needed to complete your album. There was an address printed on the back page. We considered this a kind of cheating. If any of my friends sent off for stickers, they certainly never admitted it.
We were ten the year they brought out the disasters album. It was not a World Cup summer. I suppose the company behind the album, saw a gap in the market. There was My Little Pony for the girls, and Barbie stickers too. There was Thomas the Tank Engine, for little kids, but nothing which appealed to the likes of us. Disaster stickers were exactly what they purported to be. You could buy them in six packs from the newsagent. They came in tiny foil envelopes, tucked in next to a slither of gum, so the cards themselves were always floury with powdered sugar and smelt a little chemically. Each page of the Disaster Album featured a different horrific event: the sinking of the Titanic, the Great Fire of London, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. There were photos, facts and statistics lined along the side of the page and space for three to four stickers illustrating the text.
Our parents approved of the Disaster Album. They believed it to be educational and, while, they forbade us from consuming the chewing gum, were happy enough to shell out 49p for a packet of stickers, each time we passed the newsagent’s door. Our parents did not understand the mindset of ten year old boys. We were not interested in being educated. We did not wish to learn more about history. We were horrible, bloodthirsty children, drawn by the violence and the suffering. We’d look at the statistics on each page of the album and revel in just how many people had died in each of the separate disasters. The more, the better, in our opinion. We were horrible boys.
After six weeks of serious collecting, we’d arrived at the same inevitable point. Each of us were missing around a dozen stickers: the twelve rarest and most interesting ones. No matter how many packets we purchased, pooling our pocket money for the greater good, we were still missing three hologram stickers, four key characters and the entire page’s worth associated with the Black Death. We would, at this point, have seriously considered sending off for the missing stickers but for some reason, the Disaster Album did not include a contactable address.
It was Simon, who first suggested a solution, though Alan claimed it’d been his idea. We would make our own stickers to fill in the gaps. This was our only hope of completing the album and we took to it with considerable glee. Being ten years old and reasonably awful, we did not consider the consequences. When Simon suggested we go off piste and include personal disasters in our albums, we actually thought this a marvellous idea. In went several baby brothers and sisters, recently passed. In went a mother with terminal cancer and a three car pile-up and a farming accident and ever so many shootings and bombing, (this being Belfast, at a certain time).
Later we’d claim that we did not fully understand what we’d been doing with construction paper, felt tip pens and Pritt stick. When the classroom assistant found our Disaster Albums tucked beneath our desks and the teacher raged and our mothers cried and there was talk of suspension and counselling we knew well enough to lie. “We were only trying to get our albums finished,” we all said, with one practiced voice. We apologised for any hurt we might have caused. We did not admit how much we’d enjoyed it; imagining each disaster in turn, capturing them in vivid colour, holding them close -so close- we could once again feel the thrill of these moments; the way they’d interrupted our very dull lives.
Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1967 novel, Endless Night