my "Abteilungsleiter" still came to work by bicycle.
"Briefmarkenhandlung Richard Bartels" was opposite the entrance to HERTIE.
I admit, it hasn't got quite the same ring to it as the "Ten Pound Pom" but fifty pounds was what Krauts - and any other non-English migrants - had to pay towards the subsidised passage out to Australia, and on my small DM200-a-month salary, that huge sum of money might as well have been fifty thousand pounds.
There was only one way out: to sell my beloved stamp collection which I had started when I was about nine years old, and which by then, ten years later, consisted of several albums of carefully arranged stamps.
"Briefmarkensammeln" - or to give it its fancy name, 'philately' - was big business in Germany - and perhaps it still is; after all, those winters are still as long and cold as they were then, and what else can one do when the world outside is all snowed in? - and everyone collected stamps.
Copied from the 1965 address book.
Which is how I found myself, sometime in mid-1965, inside the same "Briefmarkenhandlung Richard Bartels", where on countless previous occasions I had bought those few coveted stamps that would make my collection complete, except that this time I was not buying but selling - and at a mere fraction of what the same stamps had cost me to buy.
I did raise the required fifty pounds, and I did get to Australia, and I am still here, unlike "Briefmarkenhandlung Richard Bartels". In its place is now Juwelier Rödiger GmbH who also sell ROLEX watches. Maybe I can sell them my old ROLEX Datejust, for which I have no longer any need.
