by Helene Hanff
There’s a Crescent of Nash houses—I’m not too clear about when Nash lived but he built tall white opulent houses reeking of Beau Brummell and Lady Teazle—and when the rain stopped for a little we got out of the car and sat on a park bench so I could stare at the Crescent. We chose which houses we’ll buy if we’re born rich next time.
Nora told me she came to London as a poor servant girl from Ireland before the war. She worked in one of the houses of the gentry as a kitchen maid, cutting paper-thin bread for the cucumber sandwiches.
She drove me home to Highgate for dinner. She and Sheila bought a house out there after Frank died and the younger daughter married. We drove past Hampstead Heath on the way, and Nora stopped the car at the cemetery where Karl Marx is buried. The gates were locked but I peered over the wall at him.
Their house is high in the hills of North London on an attractive suburban street that blazes with roses, every house has a rose garden in full bloom. The roses here are as wildly colored as a New England autumn: not just red, pink and yellow, but lavender roses, blue roses, purple and orange roses. Every color has a separate fragrance, I went berserk smelling my way around Nora’s garden.
We had strawberries and thick English cream for dessert, and when Nora came to her last berry she looked up at Sheila, stricken, and said:
“It came out ‘never’ again, Sheila!”
She eats berries to the old children’s rhyme to find out when she’s going to marry again: “This year, next year, sometime, never.” When it comes out “never,” Sheila has to comfort her. Sheila’s much more like Nora’s mother than her stepdaughter.
Nora cut a fresh armload of roses for me, and Sheila drove me home. She teaches in a suburban school. There are two men who take her out; I think both of them bore her, she still hasn’t met one she wants to marry.
Big excitement in the lobby when I came in because of the Evening Standard interview; one of the desk clerks had saved a copy for me.
Excerpt:
She steps into London, frightfully trim in a chic navy trouser-suit from Saks and a foulard tied French-style.
Kill yourself tying an ascot and it comes out French-style. Story of my life.
You can’t imagine how funny it strikes me when somebody calls me chic. I’m wearing the same kind of clothes I’ve worn all my life and for years I was looked on as a bohemian mess. My sister-in-law Alice, for instance, used to wear herself out every year trying to find a shoulder bag to give me for Christmas because I wouldn’t carry a handbag and nobody else wore shoulder bags so no manufacturers made them. (Handbags make you choose between your wallet, your glasses and your cigarettes. Choose two of the three and maybe you can get the bag closed.) I also wouldn’t wear high heels because I like to walk, and you can’t walk if your feet hurt. And I lived in jeans and slacks because skirts are drafty in winter and hamper you when you walk, and besides, if you’re wearing pants nobody knows there’s a run in one stocking.
So for years I was this sartorial horror who ran around in low heels, pants and shoulder bags. I still run around that way—and after a lifetime of being totally out of it, I’m so With it my pantsuit gets a rave review in the Evening Standard.
Sunday, June 20
Sallied forth with my map after breakfast and saw the sights of Bloomsbury. Got lost several times; it seems a street can be on the Left on your map without necessarily being Left of where you’re standing. Various gents came out from under umbrellas to point me where I wanted to go.
It cleared after lunch and I’m now in a neighborhood park, lying in a deck chair soaking up the fog. There are three handkerchief-sized parks very close to the hotel. This one’s just beyond the British Museum. Sign on the gate says:
RUSSELL SQUARE
PLEASE DON’T LEAVE LITTER
PERSONS WITH DOGS ARE REQUIRED TO KEEP THEM UNDER PROPER CONTROL.
There’s a rose garden in the middle of the square encircling a very practical birdbath: a marble slab with a thin jet of water in the center. A bird can stand around and drink or wash his feathers without drowning. Wish whoever designed it would go to work on the English shower problem.
An elderly gentleman in uniform just came up, bowed and said:
“Fourpence, please.”
For the use of the deck chair.
He was apologetic about the weather, he and I are the only ones out here. I said the rain was good for the roses, and he told me the gardeners in London’s squares compete every year for the honor of growing the best roses.
“I do think this year our chap has a chance,” he said. Told him I would definitely root for the Russell Square gardener.
Have to go put on the navy suit for Pat Buckley. Or I may just be mean and stay in my second-best coffee-brown on account of the weather.
Midnight
I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bed for an hour in a complete daze. I told him if I die tonight I’ll die happy, it’s all here, everything’s here.
Pat Buckley lives in Rutland Gate, it’s down in Knightsbridge or Kensington below the left-hand edge of my Visitors’ Map, I took a cab. Rutland Gate is a small compound of white stone houses round a green square. Everything in London is round a green square, they’re like small oases everywhere.
He has a ground-floor flat. I rang the bell and he opened the door and said:
“Hallo, you found it all right.”
He’s slight—thin build, thin face, indeterminate age—and he has one of those light, almost brittle, English voices, pleasant but neutral. He took my jacket and ushered me into an Oscar Wilde drawing room. There’s a full-length portrait of his mother in her court-presentation gown on one wall. On another wall, a glass cabinet houses his collection of gentleman’s calling-card cases—small square cases, gold, silver, onyx inlaid with pearl, ivory worked with gold filligree, no two alike. The collection is his hobby and it’s dazzling.
He brought me sherry, and when I told him I found Eton very glamorous he brought me his Eton class book and showed me photos of his rooms there.
We had supper in the dining room at a polished mahogany table set with heavy English silver. He has a “daily” who leaves a cold supper for him and his guests and makes the coffee and sets the table before she leaves. The place setting was the same as at home—fork at the left, knife and spoon at the right—but lying horizontally above the dinner plate were an oyster fork and a soup spoon. I let him go first so I could see what you did with them.
We had chicken salad followed by strawberries and cream—and that’s what you use them for: you spear a strawberry with the oyster fork, scoop cream up on the soup spoon, transfer the berry to the spoon and slurp.
After supper we climbed into his car. He didn’t ask what I wanted to see, he just drove me to the corner where the Globe Theatre stood. Nothing is there now, the lot is empty. I made him stop the car and I got out and stood on that empty lot and I thought the top of my head would come off.
He got out of the car then, and we prowled the dark alleys nearby—Shakespeare’s alleys, still there. And Dickens’ alleys: he pointed to an Artful Dodger peering furtively out the window of an ancient pile of stone.
He took me to a pub called The George, and as he opened the door for me he said in that light, neutral voice:
“Shakespeare used to come here.”
I mean I went through a door Shakespeare once went through, and into a pub he knew. We sat at a table against the back wall and I leaned my head back, against a wall Shakespeare’s head once touched, and it was indescribable.
The pub was crowded. People were standing at the bar and all the tables were full. I was suddenly irritated at all those obtuse citizens eating and drinking without any apparent sense of where they were, and I said snappishly:
“I could imagine Shakespeare walking in now, if it weren’t for the people.”
And the minute I said it I knew I was wrong. He said it before I could:
“Oh no. The people are just the same.”
/> And of course they were. Look again, and there was a blond, bearded Justice Shallow talking to the bartender. Further along the bar, Bottom the Weaver was telling his ponderous troubles to a sharp-faced Bardolph. And at a table right next to us, in a flowered dress and pot-bellied white hat, Mistress Quickly was laughing fit to kill.
He dragged me out of there and drove me to see St. Paul’s by floodlight. I wanted at least to walk up the steps and touch the doors of John Donne’s cathedral but it will be there tomorrow, there’s time, there’s time.
He drove me to the Tower of London, more huge and terrifying than I’d imagined, like a sprawling medieval Alcatraz. We got there just at ten, so I could watch the guards lock the Tower gates. For all their flashy black-and-scarlet uniforms, they are grim and frightening as they lock the gates to that dread prison with darkness closing in. You think of the young Elizabeth sitting somewhere behind the stone walls wanting to write and ask Bloody Mary to have her beheaded with a sword instead of an ax.
When the gates were locked, the guards marched back toward the huge iron Tower door. It rose to let them pass through, lowered and clanged shut behind them, and the light voice beside me said:
“They haven’t missed a night in seven hundred years.”
The mind boggles. Even going back only three hundred years, you think of London during the Great Fire, the Great Plague, the Cromwell revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the First World War, the Second World War—
“They locked the Tower with all this ceremony,” I asked him, “every night, even during the Blitz?”
“Oh yes,” he said.
Put THAT on Hitler’s tombstone, tell THAT to that great American patriot, Wernher von Braun, whose buzz bombs destroyed every fourth house in London.
When he drove me home and I tried to thank him, he said:
“Oh, thank you! Most Americans won’t take this tour. They’ll drive around with me for a quarter of a hour and then they want to know where the Dorchester Bar is.”
He said most Americans he knows never see London.
“They take a taxi from the Hilton to Harrods, from Harrods to the theatre, from the theatre to the Dorchester Bar.”
He said he knows four American businessmen who’ve been in London for a week without ever leaving the Hilton.
“They stay shut up in their rooms all day with the telephone and a bottle of Scotch, you wonder why they ever left the States.”
He gave me a list of sights to see but didn’t suggest showing them to me himself.
Monday, June 21
Eddie and Isabel picked me up this morning to go sight-seeing. Isabel is an old school friend, they live in Texas. They are the most conventional, conservative people I know.
It was sunny this morning, and when they came for me the sight of them charmed me: Isabel wore cotton overalls and a print blouse, Eddie was in a sports shirt and slacks. It was the first time I’d ever seen them that they didn’t look ultra proper-and-respectable. I had an interview at Broadcasting House at three and I thought I might not get back here first so I wore my marked-down beige linen pantsuit; next to them I was overdressed.
They’d been to London before and had seen the sights so we just wandered around the shopping district all morning. They like to window-shop and buy curios and good prints and we did that. At lunch time, we were wandering along a street when I stopped suddenly and gawked because there, directly ahead of us, was Claridge’s.
Claridge’s is where all the characters in Noel Coward lunch. For years I’ve had glamorous images of fashionable London sailing grandly into Claridge’s—and there before my eyes was today’s fashionable London still sailing grandly into Claridge’s.
Eddie asked what I was staring at and I explained.
“Fine,” he said promptly. “We’ll have lunch at Claridge’s.”
It was a spontaneous, generous gesture very typical of him. I waited for Isabel to say, “Now Eddie, not the way we’re dressed!” but to my astonishment, she didn’t.
“I think it’s very fancy,” I said. “Lets go home and change first.”
“They’ll take our money,” said Eddie dryly—and took our arms and led us proudly into Claridge’s.
I’m a slob by nature. On an ordinary day at home I couldn’t care less how I look. But this was CLARIDGE’S. I sat through lunch in that room of grace and elegance surrounded by tables of perfectly groomed Londoners—sandwiched between two happy Texans dressed for a picnic and affectionately pleased at having taken me somewhere special.
After lunch they went with me to Broadcasting House, and then more window shopping, and at six we were in the theater district. A few people were on line at the Aldwych hoping for last-minute return tickets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Eddie spoke to a man on line and came back and said:
“There are always a few returns. If we get on line now, we can get tickets at seven, when the box office opens. It’s a seven-thirty curtain, we’ll eat afterwards.”
This was the Peter Brook production, you understand, the National Shakespeare Theater Company production. I would have given a week of my life for a ticket. I’d tried to get them for Nora and Sheila and me through the hotel, it was the one show I couldn’t get, it’s sold out for the rest of the run. And much as I wanted to see it, I couldn’t have walked into that theater looking the way we looked—in clothes we’d worn since early morning and without so much as having washed our faces all day. And Eddie and Isabel, who wouldn’t have dreamed of going to the theater that way in Houston, were ready to do it in London.
The whole thing was academic for me: I couldn’t have stood on that line for ten minutes, much less an hour. I’d stood peering in at shop windows most of the day with my teeth gritted and by six I’d had it. I told them I thought I’d call it a day and go sit somewhere before my insides fell out on the pavement. They’re old friends, they immediately abandoned the project and we went to dinner at a little side-street pub instead.
Not till I got home did it dawn on me that they and I had completely reversed roles. Coming abroad, where nobody knows them, Eddie and Isabel have rid themselves of a lot of social inhibitions. Coming abroad, where noboddy knows me, I’ve acquired a whole set of inhibitions I never had at home. Wild?
Carmen just phoned to remind me of the Autograph Party tomorrow and the Deutsch dinner tomorrow night. I told her I have a calendar propped against the traveling clock so it’s the first thing I see when I turn the alarm off in the morning.
Asked her what I do if nobody shows up for my autograph; she said briskly Talk to the manager, he’s a fan. After twenty minutes say you have a headache and he’ll get you a cab.
Tuesday, June 22
We toured the bookshops in the rain. They all had 84 prominently displayed, and all the managers and sales people bowed and beamed and shook my hand, and after the third bookshop I got terribly poised and gracious about it all, like I was used to it. We got to Poole’s at two-thirty for the Autograph Party—and would you believe a long line of people waiting for my important autograph? On a rainy Tuesday?
They’d set up a table for me at the head of the line and I sat down and asked the first man to tell me his name and a bit about himself so I could write something personal, I cannot break myself of the habit of autographing books with chummy little messages that take up the whole front page.
A lady from California plunked down twelve copies and got out her list and said, This first one’s for her brother Arnold in the hospital, could I write something cheerful? and this one’s for Mrs. Pratt next door who’s watering her plants, and this one’s for her daughter-in-law Pat, could I write “To Pat From Mother Crawford Via—”? Twelve. Now and then I’d squint along the line (I wasn’t wearing my glasses, I’m a celebrity) and apologize for keeping everybody waiting; they all just smiled and went on standing patiently, people are unbelievable.
I got nearly to the end of the line and said automatically without looking up, “Will you tell me your name, sir?” and he sai
d “Pat Buckley,” meekly, and I looked up and there he was with two books under his arms. I told him I want to give him a copy. I autographed his two for him to give to friends.
He asked whether I’m free on Saturday if he’s “able to arrange a little outing”; I said I’m free for any outing he arranges any day at all, and he beamed and said he’d be in touch.
After the autographing, I had sherry with the manager, Mr. Port. (Fact.) He gave me a letter someone had left there for me and I put it in my shoulder bag and brought it home and just now remembered it and got it out and opened it.
Dear Miss Hanff—
Welcome to England. A benefactor from Philadelphia sent us your book and we love it, as do all our friends.
I wonder if you would be free on Monday next, June 28, and would like to see Peter Brook’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with us? It is at the National Shakespeare Company’s London theater, the Aldwych. We are taking two Australian friends with us, both devotees of your book.
My husband is English, so am I, but I had an American mother.
We’d love it if you are free to come. Will you telephone me?—and we can plan where to meet and eat first.
Sincerely,
Joyce Grenfell
I feel as if God had leaned down from heaven and pasted a gold star on my forehead.
I’m sitting here all gussied up in the silk cocktail-dress-and-coat for the Deutsch dinner, ready half an hour early as usual. I’m afraid even to smoke, I’ll get ashes on it.
1 a.m.
The desk buzzed up when the car came, and when I went down to the lobby, Mr. Otto, the Kenilworth manager, bowed ceremoniously and said:
“Madam’s car awaits.”
Told him this was my first and last chance to be a celebrity and I was gonna make the most of it. He nodded solemnly and said: “Quite.” He and the two boys who work as desk clerks get a charge out of all my roses and phone calls and notes-left-at-the-desk. So do I, believe it.