by Helene Hanff
Unless you’re interested chiefly in the architecture, visiting Oxford is very frustrating. All that is open to tourists at any college is the Yard outside it and the chapel just inside the front door. Everything else is off limits. So I’ll never see those freshmans rooms and I’ll never know whether there is still “much snap-dragon” growing outside the window, as there was in Newman’s day. And I’ll never see the rooms Milton wrote in or the rooms Q taught in at Cambridge because Cambridge has the same restrictions.
We got back to Laura’s house—five minutes before fifteen-year-old David came home panting and breathless, he’d run all the way just to meet me, I’ve never been so flattered.
The Colonel had a cup of tea and then marched off to a bedroom and took a nap, and Laura and David and I sat in the kitchen and swapped stories about Philadelphia, where their home is and where I grew up. They go back in September.
Over tea, Laura got very guilt-ridden about my day and begged me to sneak back up on a train one day and do Oxford by myself. (“Don’t even let us know you’re here if you don’t want to,” she said, and David said, “Why can’t she let us know she’s here?”) I told her I’d seen what I most wanted to see—and within the limits of what was possible, it was true.
Driving back to London we passed a village called Thame—pronounced as spelled, like “same” with a lisp—and the Colonel told me why the Thames is pronounced Temmes. Seems the first Hanover king had a thick German accent and couldn’t pronounce th. He called the river “te Temmes” and since the-king-is-always-right everybody else had to call it the Temmes and it’s been the Temmes ever since.
He told me about all the widows who depend on him for advice, they all seem to have “lashings of money” and children who adore him.
We got home at nine. I’ll be grateful to him all my life for the trip, but it was a lot of togetherness. I holed up in the bar to write this; the Lounge is more comfortable and also free but anybody who talked to me tonight would’ve got bit.
Flock of messages for me at the desk. Marc Connelly phoned, the London Reader’s Digest phoned, Nikki’s Barbara phoned and a woman I never heard of phoned. The desk clerk was very impressed by all the messages. So was I.
Saturday, July 3
I just called Marc Connelly. He was a reigning playwright when I was a child and my parents were rabid theatergoers. They should have lived to see the fan letter he wrote me. It came just before Christmas and I almost threw it away without opening it. His name is on some way-out charity I don’t care for, and I thought the letter was another appeal. Not till my hand was hovering over the wastebasket did it occur to me that the envelope was very thin for a charity appeal. So I opened it.
Dear Miss Hanff:
What with all those other letters closing in on you (How many grateful people have written up to now—one million? two million?) I don’t expect you’ll get around to reading this for a year or more.
Anyway, sooner or later you’ll find it’s just like all the others: telling you that “84, Charing Cross Road” is tender and funny and incandescent and beautiful and makes the reader rejoice to be living in the same century with you.
Genuflections,
Marc Connelly
And I almost threw it away without opening it.
I met him a few months later, and he told me he’d be in London in July, at his club, and he’d take me to see what a gentleman’s club looks like.
He’ll pick me up tomorrow at one for lunch.
Can’t call Nikki’s Barbara or the Reader’s Digest till Monday, both offices are closed Saturdays. Nikki—the friend whose deviled egg Chester-the-Sheep-Dog sat on at our Central Park picnic—works for a news magazine in New York. Barbara works for the same news magazine in London. The two girls have never met but they talk to each other every day over the teletype so they’re good friends. Nikki made us promise to meet while I’m here.
I can definitely make it till the fifteenth, dinner invitations coming in nicely. I just phoned that woman I never heard of who called while I was away. She said she and her husband are fans of the book and want me to come to dinner to see their part of London. I’m going there Tuesday.
Every breathing tourist who has breakfast in this hotel has seen a piece of royalty but me. (How I know is, whoever is breakfasting alone at the next table strikes up a conversation with you, usually beginning with, “Might I trouble you for the marmalade?”) Either they saw the Family leave for Windsor, or they were getting on the elevator at Harrods just as the Queen Mother was getting off it, or they saw Princess Anne wave as she entered the hospital, or they just-by-good-chance happened to be passing by this boys’ school as seven-year-old Prince Edward was coming out with the other boys. So this morning I’m going down to Buckingham Palace and try my luck.
10 p.m.
Went down to Buckingham Palace, walked up and down along the spiked iron fence for a while but all I saw was one more anachronism: a seventeenth-century carriage drawn by white horses, driven through the gates by a fancy-dress coachman, and inside the carriage a pair of cold-eyed diplomats in top hats with cigarettes hanging out of their twentieth-century faces.
I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds, gates, guards, all designed to ensure the family absolute privacy. And every newspaper in London carried headlines announcing PRINCESS ANNE HAS OVARIAN CYST REMOVED. I mean you’re a young girl reared in heavily guarded seclusion and every beer drinker in every pub knows the precise state of your ovaries.
Walked home by way of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a park this side of the Inns of Court facing a lovely row of houses on a street called King’s Bench Walk. Sat on a bench and looked at the houses and listened to the conversations going by:
“. . . well, not uncouth, he looks like a Highland rabbi.”
“. . . but she wasn’t getting anywhere out there so she packed it in and now she’s home, looking . . .”
“They’re all out to save their own neckties, you can bloody bet on that!”
I’m in the bar again. I don’t normally drink after dinner but in this hotel they think you’re strange if you drink before dinner. So at 10 P.M. I’m having a martini. More or less.
The first night I came in here I said to the young bartender:
“A martini, please.”
He reached for a bottle of Martini & Rossi vermouth and poured a glass full of it before I could scream WAIT A MINUTE!
“Would you put the gin in first, please?” I asked.
“Oh!” he said. “You want a gin martini.”
He got the gin bottle and a shaker, and I said:
“Would you put some ice in the shaker, please? I like it cold.”
“Right-o!” he said. He put an ice cube in the shaker, poured a jigger of gin on it, added half a cup of vermouth, stirred once, poured it out and handed it to me with a flourish. I paid him and shuffled over to a table telling myself sternly.
“Don’t be like all those American tourists who can’t adapt to another country’s customs, just drink it.”
Nobody could drink it.
The next time I came in it was dinner time, the bar was empty and the bartender and I got chummy; he said Wasn’t I the writer? and told me his name was Bob. I said Did he mind if this time we used my recipe instead of his and he said Right-o, just tell him exactly what I wanted.
I said First could we start with four ice cubes in the shaker. He thought I was crazy but he put three cubes in (he was short on ice). He poured a jigger of gin in the shaker and I said:
“Okay, now another jigger of gin.”
He stared at me, shook his head in disbelief and added a second jigger of gin.
“Okay, now one more,” I said.
“MORE gin?” he said, and I said:
“Yes, and lower your voice.”
He poured the third jigger, still shaking his head. He reached for the vermouth bottle, and I said:
<
br /> “I’ll pour that.”
I added a few drops of vermouth, stirred vigorously, let him pour it out for me and told him it was perfect.
Now he makes it by himself but he never can bring himself to add that third jigger of gin, he thinks he’ll look up later and see me sprawled face down on a bar table sodden drunk.
Sunday, July 4
Got very gloomy remembering the days before the Viet Nam War when I gloried in my country’s history and July 4 meant something.
Marc Connelly picked me up at one. I wore the brown skirt and white blazer, and he said, “Don’t you look fine in your little yachting outfit,” and saluted. He said we’d have lunch at the Hilton because nothing else is open.
The Hilton has several dining rooms, he took me into the largest. It was crowded with sleek, well-groomed men and beautifully dressed women; nobody looked dowdy the way they do at the Kenilworth. And the strawberries were huge and the cream was thick and the rolls were hot and the butter was cold and the chicken livers were done to perfection.
But at the Kenilworth, nobody sends the eggs back. Nobody talks to the waiters with the casual rudeness that says, “I am better than you are because I am richer.” And the waiters don’t answer with that studied blend of contempt and servility, and none are obsequious—my God, Alvaro couldn’t even pronounce it. And nobody at a Kenilworth breakfast table looks bitter or discontented, no men at the Kenilworth moodily drink their lunch, no women with hard-painted faces keep a sharp eye on their handbags.
You look at the faces in the Hilton dining room and first you want to smack them and then you just feel sorry for them, not a soul in the room looked happy.
After lunch Marc took me to his club on St. James’s Street. The building looks narrow from the street; but you step through the doorway into an enormous drawing room with other large rooms beyond it, you climb a great curved staircase, the wall alongside lined with portraits of club presidents all looking like Peter Ustinov, and upstairs you find more spacious rooms—breakfast rooms, game rooms, reading rooms. We watched cricket for a while on color TV in one of the game rooms. At least, I watched it. Marc went to sleep. He’s eighty, he’s allowed.
I woke him at three to say I was leaving and he said cheerfully, “Now you know what I think of cricket!” and saw me to the door and told me to walk down Jermyn Street and look in the shop windows.
I did that, and then went over to Regent and was walking down Waterloo on my way to St. James’s Park when who should I run into, standing on a corner on a little pedestal looking small and spruce, but Gentlemanly Johnny Burgoyne who lost the Battle of Saratoga to us rebels. I think he was supposed to link up with some other general’s forces but there was a snafu and Burgoyne’s entire army was captured. He’d be pleased to know he’s the most appealing character in The Devil’s Disciple, he was a playwright himself. He wrote a play and produced it in Boston, with his officers in the cast, when his troops occupied the city. Can’t imagine what possessed the British to put up a statue to him, I suppose he won some battle somewhere but he lost the American Revolution almost singlehanded.
Wished him a happy Fourth.
When I got down to the Mall there was a band concert going on. In honor of the Fourth of July the band played “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Well, why not? I don’t know who Hampden was, why should they know July Fourth doesn’t commemorate the Civil War?
Sunned myself in St. James’s Park for a while but the band concert went on and on and I wasn’t in the mood so I thought I’d walk up to Lincoln’s Inn Fields instead. I couldn’t get back up the broad marble steps, they were jammed with concert listeners, so I walked along the Mall looking for another exit. I came to a small flight of steps, maneuvered my way around the people sitting on them and came up into Carlton Gardens, a beautiful street of very plush apartment houses. It reminded me a little of Sutton Place: the buildings, the expensive cars at the curb, the starched nanny going by pushing a pram, all reeked of money. I walked around it and maybe I walked along an adjoining street, I’m not sure. Then I turned a corner and found myself on a street I had not been on before and the likes of which I never expect to be on again.
I don’t even know where I was. I could find no name to the street, I’m not even sure it was a street. It was a kind of enclosed courtyard, a cul-de-sac behind Clarence House and St. James’s Palace. The anonymous white buildings on it might be the backs of the palaces. The white stone glows sumptuous and the street is absolutely still. A footstep is loud and you stand without moving, almost without breathing. There is no reek of money here, only the hallowed hush of privilege. Your mind fills with stories of the fairy-tale splendor of monarchy, the regal pomp of England’s kings and queens. And then suddenly you remember Karl Marx in an untroubled grave in Highgate, and Queen Mary welcoming Gandhi as she had welcomed the rajahs before him, as George III had been forced to welcome as Ambassador to the Court of St. James old upstart John Adams. You are awed by the contrasts—by the fact of St. James’s and Clarence House resting so serenely in Socialist England.
You decide to stop using the word “anachronism” when a seventeenth-century carriage drives through the gates of Buckingham Palace carrying twentieth-century Russian or African diplomats to be welcomed by a queen. “Anachronism” implies something long dead, and nothing is dead here. History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.
Monday, July 5
Nikki’s Barbara phoned this morning; we made a lunch date for Friday. I gave her a couple of questions to ask Nikki over the teletype, she’ll bring the answers to lunch with her.
I called the Reader’s Digest office and the girl there said they’re using the fan-mail article in the English edition but it deals only with American fan mail, didn’t I have any English fans? Shades of the Colonel, didn’t I just. I explained that the article was written and sold before the English fan mail arrived, and she said Would I dreadfully mind writing a page or two about the English fan mail? They go to press in a few days, they would have to have the new pages tomorrow, could I possibly?
I felt like saying, “Lady, this is the first real vacation I’ve ever had in my life and I’ve only got ten days of it left!” But unfortunately it crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be having the first real vacation of my life if it weren’t for the Reader’s Digest, so I said it would be a pleasure.
Will now shlep up the street to Deutsch’s and borrow a typewriter.
Later
Wrote three new pages and took them down to the Digest office in Berkeley Square and walked home by a lovely new route, straight up the Visitors’ Map to the Regent’s Park area and then over. Somewhere along the way I came upon a mews with a small sign on the entrance gate addressed to the passing world. The sign orders flatly:
COMMIT NO NUISANCE
The more you stare at that, the more territory it covers. From dirtying the streets to housebreaking to invading Viet Nam, that covers all the territory there is.
There was a letter at the desk for me when I came back:
Can you be here Wednesday at noon sharp, for a visit to two stately homes of England?
In haste—
P. B.
Mary Scott just phoned. She wrote me last spring that she and her husband are Californians who spend every spring and summer in London, and she offered to take me on a walking tour. She told me she’s had house guests for a month, they’ve just left and she’s finally free for that walking tour, she’ll pick me up for the tour Thursday morning and take me home to dinner afterwards.
Tomorrow night I’m having dinner with the English couple who phoned me while I was in Stratford, and the Scotts are feeding me Thursday, so I may just spring for a hairdresser on the dinner money I’m saving.
Tuesday, July 6
Had my hair done at a little shop out Regent’s Park way on Paddington Street, and the pretty hairdresser asked Was I from the States, and I said Yes.
“How do you find London?” sh
e asked. “Do the noise and the crowds bother you?”
The what?
For a big city, London is incredibly quiet. The traffic is worse than at home because the streets here are so narrow; but the cars are very quiet going by in the street and there are no trucks at all, a city ordinance bans them. Even the sirens are quiet. The ambulance sirens go BlooOOP, blooOOP, like a walrus weeping under water.
And I haven’t seen anything here, not even on a bus, that a New Yorker would describe as a crowd.
Midnight
Those English fans who invited me to dinner are a charming couple, they live in Kensington in a mews. A mews is an alley built originally for stables and carriage barns, and the fad is to convert the barns and stables into modern homes, everybody wants to live in a converted stable, it’s chic.
But stables and carriage barns were built of stone and they don’t have windows. And the horses weren’t interested in indoor plumbing or electricity. You buy one of these stables and kill yourself turning a horse’s stall into a very peculiar kitchen (cramped between two high stone partitions); you wire all the stalls for electricity, you pipe them for water, you get all your kitchen and bathroom equipment and furniture moved into the proper horses’ stalls—and when you’re all through you still can’t chop a hole through a foot-thick stone wall for windows, so you have everything you need but air. The couple I had dinner with live in a charming little stable which, they explained to me cheerfully, is so hot all summer they get out of it as soon after supper as possible. In winter they freeze without heat and suffocate with it.
Across the street from them is Agatha Christie, just as comfortably situated and a lot older.
Demented.
They fed me an elegant salmon steak and drove me through Chiswick—pronounced Chizzick—and we walked along the Strand on the Green. The Strand on the Green is a lovely avenue overlooking the Thames, you can run down the front steps of the houses and jump in the river. The houses were built by Charles II for his mistresses. They are very beautiful and charming, very expensive and sought-after, and the elite who live in them are envied just as much as if the Thames didn’t overflow every now and then and flood all their living rooms.