The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

by Helene Hanff

  I was perfectly calm and happy until a voice announced over the intercom that it was 9:50 P.M. British time, we would be landing at Heathrow Airport in five minutes and it was raining in London.

  “Don’t panic,” I told myself. “Just decide now what you’ll do if Nora and Sheila aren’t there and that nut at the airport forgot this is the day you’re coming.”

  I decided I would look up Nora and Sheila Doel in the phone book and call them. If they didn’t answer I would look up Carmen of Deutsch’s. If she didn’t answer I would go up to an airport official and say:

  “Excuse me, sir. I have just arrived from New York, I have a suitcase I can’t budge, I don’t know where the Kenilworth Hotel is and I am Not Well.”

  The plane began its descent and the passengers moved about, collecting hand luggage. I had no hand luggage. I sat frozen and told myself that if nobody met me I would sit in the airport till the next plane left for New York and fly home. At which moment the voice spoke again into the intercom:

  “Will Miss Hanff please identity herself to a member of the staff?”

  I leaped to my feet and held up my free hand (one hand being permanently attached to the pants) only to find there wasn’t a member of the staff in sight. The other passengers, lining up to leave the plane, stared at me curiously as, red-faced but awash with relief, I gathered up everything in my free hand and got on the end of the line. Now that I knew I was being met, I was giddy and half drunk with excitement. I had never really expected to make it to London—and I’d made it.

  I reached the stewardess who was saying goodbye to disembarking passengers, and told her I was Miss Hanff. She pointed to the bottom of the ramp and said:

  “The gentleman is waiting for you.”

  And there he was, a big, towering Colonel Blimp with a beaming smile on his face and both arms outstretched, waiting to get my dainty feet onto British soil. As I went down the ramp to meet him, I thought:

  “Jean was right. Keep a diary.”

  Thursday, June 17

  Midnight

  There’s a radio in the headboard of this bed, the BBC just bid me goodnight. The entire radio system here goes to bed at midnight.

  Arrival triumphant.

  “Helene, my dear!” boomed the Colonel, stooping to kiss me on the cheek, nobody would have believed he’d never set eyes on me before. He’s a beaming giant of a man with tufted gray eyebrows and tufted white sideburns, and a vast stomach that marches on ahead of him; and he strode off to see to my suitcase ramrod straight, a Sahib out of Kipling’s Old Injah. He came back, followed by a porter with the suitcase on a trolley, put an arm around me and walked me past the Immigration and Customs tables, calling genially to the men behind them, “Friend of mine!” and that was all I saw of Immigration and Customs.

  “Now then,” he said. “Are you being met?”

  I told him Nora and Sheila Doel were there somewhere.

  “What do they look like?” he asked, scanning the crowd jammed behind a rope that cordoned off the arrival area.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Have they a snapshot of you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Do they know what you’re wearing?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “But my dear girl!” he boomed. “How did you expect to find them?! Wait here.”

  He parked me in front of an Information Desk and strode off. A moment later, a voice over the public-address system asked Mrs. Doel to come to the Information Desk—and a pretty, black-haired woman ducked under the cordon directly in front of me, thrust a sheaf of roses in my arms and kissed me.

  “Sheila said it was you!” said Nora in a rich Irish brogue. “We saw every woman off the plane. I said, ‘That one’s too blond,’ and, ‘That one’s too common.’ Sheila just kept sayin’, ‘It’s the little one in the blue trouser suit, she looks so excited.’”

  The Colonel steamed up and got introduced, and we went out to Nora’s car. She and Sheila got in front, I got in back and the Colonel announced he would follow in his car, unless Sheila would rather he led? Did she know the way to the Cumberland?

  “The Kenilworth,” I corrected. I explained about the two hotel rooms and the Colonel stared at me in horror.

  “Well, in that case,” he bellowed, “some total stranger at the Cumberland has a roomful of beautiful roses!”

  He drove off to the Cumberland to reclaim his roses and I drove off toward the Kenilworth with Nora’s roses in my arms, thinking, “It was roses, roses, all the way,” and trying to remember who wrote it.

  It was dark and rainy as we drove along a highway that might have been any highway leading to any city, instead of the road to the one city I’d waited a lifetime to see. Nora was lecturing me for not staying with her and Sheila in North London (“Frank always meant you to stay with us!”), and as we entered London both of them pointed out the sights:

  “There’s Piccadilly!”

  “This is the West End.”

  “This is Regent Street.” And finally, from Sheila:

  “You’re on Charing Cross Road, Helene!”

  I peered out at the darkness, wanting to say something appropriate, but all I could see were narrow wet streets and a few lighted dress-shop windows, it could have been downtown Cleveland.

  “I’m here,” I said. “I’m in London. I made it.” But it wasn’t real.

  We drove on to Bloomsbury and found the Kenilworth on the corner of a dark street. It’s an old brownstone with a shabby-genteel lobby, it’s going to suit me.

  I registered and the young desk clerk handed me some mail, and then Nora and Sheila and I rode up to inspect Room 352. It looked pleasant and cheerful with the drapes drawn against the rain. Nora surveyed it judiciously from the doorway and announced:

  “It’s gawjus, Helen.”

  “My name’s Helene,” I said.

  She looked surprised but unimpressed.

  “I’ve been calling you ‘Helen’ for twenty years,” she said, peering into the bathroom. It has a shower stall but no tub. “Look at this Sheila, she’s got her own loo!”

  The loo is the toilet, Sheila thinks it comes from Waterloo.

  We went back down and found the Colonel fuming in the sleepy lobby: he’d found his roses lying half dead on the Cumberland Package Room floor and had had a row with the management.

  We went into the dining room, empty but still open, and the Colonel located a young Spanish waiter who said his name was Alvaro and allowed we could have sandwiches and tea-or-coffee.

  “You smoke too much, Helen,” Nora announced, after we ordered.

  “I know it,” I said.

  “You’re too thin,” she went on. “I dunno what kind of bloke that surgeon is, to let you come away so soon after your op. A hysterectomy is a very serious op.”

  “Is it, Mum,” said Sheila mildly in her university accent. She and Nora exchanged a look, and Nora giggled. They’re remarkable, they talk in code and finish each other’s sentences, you’d never guess they were stepmother and daughter. Sheila’s an attractive girl in her twenties, laconic and unruffled. (“Just like Frank,” Nora told me.)

  Nora was much struck by the fact that she and the Colonel were both widowed two years ago. He has one child, a daughter who’s being married in the country on Saturday.

  “Now, why don’t you three girls put on your prettiest dresses and come to the wedding?” he invited expansively. “It’s going to be a superb wedding!”

  I declined and Nora obviously didn’t think she should go if I didn’t, so she declined, too, wistfully. (“I don’t know him, Helen,” she said when I got her alone. And I said: “Who knows him?!”)

  They left at eleven. Nora said she would give me tomorrow to rest and would call me Saturday about the interview. (“We’re being interviewed together by the BBC! You’ve made us all famous!”)

  The Colonel said he’d be in the country for a week and would call me when he got back and “arrang
e a little trip into our glorious countryside.”

  I came up and unpacked a few things and climbed into bed with the mail.

  Postcard from Eddie and Isabel, old friends from back home. They’ll be in town Monday and will pick me up to go sight-seeing.

  A note from Carmen at Deutsch’s:

  Welcome!

  I know you’re going to be very tired but I’m afraid we have a journalist from the Evening Standard along to see you here at 10 A.M. tomorrow. Someone will be by to pick you up before 10.

  On Saturday at 2:30, the BBC want to interview you and Mrs. Doel on “The World This Weekend.”

  On Monday at 3:30 an interview on “The Woman’s Hour,” also at Broadcasting House.

  On Tuesday, visits to bookshops, including Marks & Co. (closed but still standing, and we want photos of you there), and at 2:30 an Autograph Party next door at 86 Charing Cross Road, Poole’s Bookshop.

  On Tuesday evening, André Deutsch will give a dinner for you to meet the Deutsch officers and a distinguished journalist.

  I just got uneasy about remembering all those dates, and got out of bed and made a day-to-day calendar out of a pocket memo book. I’m also uneasy about how I’m going to break the news to Carmen that I don’t have my picture taken. I’m neurotic, I don’t like my face.

  I lie here listening to the rain, and nothing is real. I’m in a pleasant hotel room that could be anywhere. After all the years of waiting, no sense at all of being in London. Just a feeling of letdown, and my insides offering the opinion that the entire trip was unnecessary.

  Friday, June 18

  The alarm clock went off at eight and I got out of bed and went to the window to see if it was still raining. I pulled back the drapes—and as long as I live I’ll never forget the moment. From across the street a neat row of narrow brick houses with white front steps sat looking up at me. They’re perfectly standard eighteen- or nineteenth-century houses, but looking at them I knew I was in London. I got lightheaded. I was wild to get out on that street. I grabbed my clothes and tore into the bathroom and fought a losing battle with the damnedest shower you ever saw.

  The shower stall is a four-foot cubicle and it has only one spigot, nonadjustable, trained on the back corner. You turn the spigot on and the water’s cold. You keep turning, and by the time the water’s hot enough for a shower you’ve got the spigot turned to full blast. Then you climb in, crouch in the back corner and drown. Dropped the soap once and there went fifteen dollars’ worth of hairdresser down the drain, my shower cap was lifted clear off my head by the torrent. Turned the spigot off and stepped thankfully out—into four feet of water. It took me fifteen minutes to mop the floor using a bathmat and two bath towels, sop-it-up, wring-it-out, sop-wring, sop-wring. Glad I shut the bathroom door or the suitcase would have been washed away.

  After breakfast, I went out in the rain to look at those houses. The hotel is on the corner of Great Russell and Bloomsbury Streets. It fronts on Great Russell, which is a commercial street; the houses I saw from my window are on Bloomsbury.

  I walked slowly along the street, staring across it at the houses. I came to the corner, to a dark little park called Bedford Square. On three sides of it, more rows of neat, narrow brick houses, these much more beautiful and beautifully cared for. I sat on a park bench and stared at the houses. I was shaking. And I’d never in my life been so happy.

  All my life I’ve wanted to see London. I used to go to English movies just to look at streets with houses like those. Staring at the screen in a dark theatre, I wanted to walk down those streets so badly it gnawed at me like hunger. Sometimes, at home in the evening, reading a casual description of London by Hazlitt or Leigh Hunt, I’d put the book down suddenly, engulfed by a wave of longing that was like homesickness. I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die. I used to tell myself this was natural in a writer and booklover born to the language of Shakespeare. But sitting on a bench in Bedford Square it wasn’t Shakespeare I was thinking of; it was Mary Bailey.

  I come of very mixed ancestry, which includes an English Quaker family named Bailey. A daughter of that family, Mary Bailey, born in Philadelphia in 1807, was the only ancestor I had any interest in when I was a little girl. She left a sampler behind and I used to stare at that sampler, willing it to tell me what she was like. I don’t know why I wanted to know.

  Sitting in Bedford Square I reminded myself that Mary Bailey was born in Philadelphia, died in Virginia and never saw London. But the name persisted in my head. Maybe she was a namesake. Maybe it was her grandmother or great-grandmother who had wanted to go home again. All I knew, sitting there, was that some long-dead Mary Bailey or other had finally found a descendent to go home for her.

  I came back here and fixed myself up so I’d make a good impression on Deutsch’s. Brushed my navy suit jacket (which they will flatly refuse to believe back home) and spent half an hour tying my new red-white-and-blue scarf in an ascot so I’d look British. Then I went down to the lobby and sat bolt upright in a chair by the door, afraid to move for fear of mussing myself, till a young secretary blew in to escort me three doors up Great Russell Street to Deutsch’s.

  I met Carmen—very brisk and efficient and dramatic-looking—and got interviewed by a bouncy young reporter from the Evening Standard named Valerie Jenkins. After the interview the three of us and a photographer piled into a cab, and Carmen said to the driver:

  “Eighty-four Charing Cross Road.”

  I felt uneasy, knowing I was on my way to that address. I’d bought books from 84 Charing Cross Road for twenty years. I’d made friends there whom I never met. Most of the books I bought from Marks & Co. were probably available in New York. For years, friends had advised me to “try O’Malley’s,” “try Dauber & Pine.” I’d never done it. I’d wanted a link with London and I’d managed it.

  Charing Cross Road is a narrow, honky-tonk street, choked with traffic, lined with second-hand bookshops. The open stalls in front were piled with old books and magazines, here and there a peaceful soul was browsing in the misty rain.

  We got out at 84. Deutsch’s had stuffed the empty window with copies of the book. Beyond the window the shop interior looked black and empty. Carmen went next door to Poole’s and got the key and let us in to what had once been Marks & Co.

  The two large rooms had been stripped bare. Even the heavy oak shelves had been ripped off the walls and were lying on the floor, dusty and abandoned. I went upstairs to another floor of empty, haunted rooms. The window letters which had spelled Marks & Co. had been ripped off the window, a few of them were lying on the window sill, their white paint chipped and peeling.

  I started back downstairs, my mind on the man, now dead, with whom I’d corresponded for so many years. Halfway down I put my hand on the oak railing and said to him silently:

  “How about this, Frankie? I finally made it.”

  We went outside—and I stood there and let them take my picture as meekly as if I did it all the time. That’s how anxious I am to make a good impression and not give anybody any trouble.

  When I came back to the hotel there was a letter at the desk. From Pat Buckley, the Old Etonian Jean Ely wrote to about me.

  No salutation, just:

  Jean Ely writes that you are here on your first visit. Can you have a bite of supper here on Sunday at 7:30?—and we will drive around and see a bit of old London.

  Call me Saturday or Sunday before 9:30 A.M.

  In haste—

  P.B.

  Saturday, June 19

  Totally demoralized.

  Just came up from breakfast and phoned Pat Buckley.

  “Oh, yes,” he said in a very U accent, “Hallo.”

  I told him I’d love to come to supper tomorrow night and asked if there were other people coming.

  “I’m not giving a supper party for you!” he said impatiently. “Jean wrote me you wanted to see London!”

  I stammered that I was glad we’d be alone
, I’d only asked so I’d know how to dress; if we were alone I could wear a pantsuit.

  “Oh, Lord, must you?” he said. “I loathe women in trousers. I suppose it’s old-fashioned of me but I do think you all look appalling in them. Oh well, I suppose if you must, you must.”

  It’s fifty degrees here and raining, I’m not climbing into a summer skirt for him.

  Nora just phoned, she’ll pick me up at two this afternoon for the interview.

  “You’re right behind the British Museum, Helen,” she said. “Go sit in the Reading Room, it’s very restful.”

  Told her I see enough museums in New York, and God knows I sit in enough Reading Rooms.

  Will now slog out in the wet and tour Bloomsbury.

  Midnight

  Nora and I were interviewed at Broadcasting House, it’s the only big modern building I’ve seen here and I hope I don’t see another one; it’s a monstrosity—a huge semicircular block of granite, it looks obese. They don’t understand skyscrapers here. In New York they don’t understand anything else.

  The interviewer was choice. First she told the radio audience that though Nora and I had corresponded over a twenty-year period we’d never met. Then she turned to us and asked us what we thought of each other: now that we’d met, were we disappointed? If we’d never corresponded and had just met, would we like each other?

  “Now what kind of question was that to ask me?” Nora demanded when we came out. “How-would-I-like-you-if-we’d-just-been-introduced. How do I know whether I’d have liked you or not? I’ve known you for twenty years, Helen!”

  She drove me out Portland Place and through the Regent’s Park section, which I loved passionately on sight. We passed Wimpole Street and Harley Street—and there I was in a car, I felt as if I were locked in a metal container and couldn’t get out, but it was raining. I’m going back there on foot the first dry day.