The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

by Helene Hanff

  And when they pronounce it the same they spell it differently. A curb’s a kerb, a check’s a cheque, a racket’s a racquet—and just to confuse you further, “jail is spelled “gaol” and pronounced “jail.”

  And a newsstand’s a kiosk, a subway’s the tube, a cigar store’s a tobacconist’s, a drug store’s a chemist’s, a bus is a coach, a truck is a lorry, buying on time is hire purchase, cash and carry is cash and wrap and as Shaw once observed, we are two countries divided by a common language. I am now going to bed because it’s quataposstwelve.

  Monday, July 12

  O Frabjous Day!

  From now on I remember the Reader’s Digest in all my prayers. I picked up mail at the desk, there was a letter from the London Digest office, I assumed it was page proof on the three new pages. I opened it and inside was a check for FIFTY POUNDS, I thought I would die where I stood.

  I hunted up Mr. Otto and asked if I could keep the room an extra ten days, he was shocked at the question, he said, “Did you think we’d put you out?!” and clucked.

  I tore up the street to Deutsch’s to tell everybody the news and Carmen said Ann Edwards of the Sunday Express wants to interview me Wednesday over lunch.

  “And guess where? The River Room of the Savoy! It’s the most divine place in London, I’m so happy for you.”

  Mr. Tammer couldn’t cash the check for me, he said it’s made out in such a way only a bank can cash it. Will take it to the bank tomorrow.

  I phoned Nora and told her the news and she wants to give a buffet supper for me on Friday to meet all the rare-book dealers, she wanted to do it before but they were all “on holiday.”

  Joyce Grenfell phoned about dinner tomorrow night, she’s putting a note in the mail with complete instructions for finding their flat by bus. It impresses me that in London you can mail an in-city letter on Monday and know for certain it will arrive on Tuesday. In New York you can mail a letter on Monday to an address a block away—and maybe it’ll get there on Wednesday and very possibly it won’t get there till Thursday.

  My social life being what it is, I just faced the fact that I can’t get along for two more weeks on one dress. God bless my Democratic Club and my brother, am off to Harrods with the gift certificate and the last of the cash reserve, Ena says they’re having a close-out sale of summer dresses.

  Later

  Harrods sale overpriced and mostly midi-skirts they got stuck with. I went up the street to Harvey Nichols and bought a toast-and-white linen on sale and then went back to Harrods and swapped the gift certificate for a sand-colored shoulder bag on sale. Transferred everything to it and threw my old white straw in a Harrods’ wastebasket, it’s been unraveling for a week.

  Took a cab to Johnson’s house and lunched at the Cheshire Cheese (money means nothing to me) and stopped at the Evening Standard to see Valerie—the girl who interviewed me the day I landed—to tell her the Standard’s interviewing me over again. (Now-that-I’ve-been-here-how-do-I-like-it.) While I was there, the catch on my new shoulder bag broke. Valerie was very shocked; I said, “That’s why it was on sale.” She said, “Yes, but not Harrodsl” Nobody ever says “Bonwit’s” in that tone.

  She sent me to a little shop off Fleet Street to have it fixed, and while the man repaired it for me I asked if he could point me toward Bloomsbury, I wanted to walk home. He said:

  “Go on up to O-Burn Street and follow the bus.”

  Looked for O-Burn Street, looked for Auburn Street and finally stumbled on the street he meant: High Holborn. And that’s what they mean by a cockney accent.

  Time to go crouch under that sadistic shower and then climb into the new dress for Leo and Ena.

  Midnight

  Leo took us to dinner at a plush seafood restaurant. The shellfish looks the same here as at home but tastes very different; the crabmeat and lobster are much richer here but very bland, almost tasteless to an American palate till you get used to it.

  They drove me to their flat and I saw Ena’s portrait of Hayley Mills and Pamela Brown. Pamela Brown I have a special love for, dating back to an old, old English film called I Know Where I’m Going and to a stage performance I saw her give in The Importance of Being Earnest.

  I know nothing about painting, not even the right thing to say when you like it; but those faces spoke to you. I was bowled over, I told Ena it’s indecent to be that talented when you’re pretty and blond and look fresh out of school.

  Leo announced he was going to make me his special summer drink, for which he is famous, and he trotted off to the kitchen and banged around and came back with three long, tall drinks. I don’t drink after dinner and I don’t like carbonated drinks so I don’t know one long-tall-drink from another. I sipped this one and said:

  “It’s ginger ale, isn’t it? It’s very nice.”

  “It’s gin and tonic,” said Leo, wounded.

  “The gin kind of gets lost, doesn’t it?” I said, and he loped back to the kitchen for the gin bottle. Ena was doubled up with unkind wifely laughter.

  “That’s his special drink, he’s so proud of it!” she gasped and went off into convulsions. I felt terrible. I told Leo I go through life saying the wrong thing. He put some more gin in my drink and then sat and watched me as I sipped it. When he thought I had enough of it inside me, he said:

  “The little thing wants to ask you a favor.”

  I looked at Ena and said, “What’s the favor?” but she just smiled nervously. And Leo said:

  “She wants to paint you.”

  And I said:

  “You’re crazy.”

  I know that painters see planes and angles in faces that look commonplace to the rest of us—and I still cannot understand why anyone should want to paint a plain, ordinary middle-aged face. Which I told Ena. To her, I have an interesting face, “it changes all the time.” I said I wished it would.

  I never felt so trapped. All my life I’ve avoided being photographed—and here was Ena asking earnestly Would I sit for her? She’d only need a few sittings, “p’raps three or four?” Anxious little face peering at me wistfully.

  I told her I’d do it on two conditions: one, she has to paint me in Russell Square, I’m not sitting indoors in some studio; and two, she has to promise not to make me look at the portrait either in progress or when it’s finished.

  She agreed to both conditions. She’s finishing something this week, we start next week.

  Tuesday, July 13

  Paranoid morning.

  Joyce Grenfell’s note arrived with instructions for finding her flat tonight but nothing on how to find St. Mary LeBeau’s Church in Cheapside for her dialogue with the minister at noon. I located Cheapside on my map and then decided to get the Digest check cashed before I went down there.

  I went to the nearest bank and then to another one across the street from it. Both banks were shocked to be asked to cash a Reader’s Digest check for a total stranger whose identification they declined to look at. Neither would phone the Digest or Deutsch’s for me, it wasn’t bank policy.

  I went to a third bank, where a teller passed me on to an officer who conferred with another officer and then came back and said Wouldn’t it be better if I just mailed the check to my bank in New York? I explained that I needed the cash here, which shocked him deeply. You do not say “I need cash” to a banker.

  I told him my New York bank was Chemical and asked whether there was a branch in London. He said Yes, reluctantly, but he doubted whether the London bank would cash the check. (He said “could.”) I went down to Chemical—and after asking to see everything but my teeth, they cashed it. Nothing infuriates me like those friendly, folksy bank ads in magazines and on TV. Every bank I ever walked into was about as folksy as a cobra.

  By this time I had barely half an hour to get down to Cheapside. I got on a bus and discovered I’d forgotten my map. I told the conductor I wanted to go to St. Mary LeBeau’s, Cheapside, and he let me off down near St. Paul’s, pointed to a yonder street and sa
id:

  “Walk that way a bit and turn left.”

  I walked that way a bit and turned left and walked this way a bit and turned left and turned right and asked six people, all of whom turned out to be tourists. A bus slowed down at a corner, I called to the conductor Could he tell me how to get to St. Mary LeBeau’s Church and he called back:

  “Sorry, luv, it’s m’fìrst day on the job!”

  I wished him luck, you might as well, and kept on walking. Found three wrong churches, a Godsmith’s Hall and a lot of interesting alleys but no St. Mary LeBeau’s. By this time the dialogue was over anyway and I holed up in a smoky little pub and ate myself pleasant.

  Midnight

  Joyce met me at the door and took me on a guided tour of the living-room walls, hung with Grenfell and Langhorne family portraits and photographs. Her mother was one of the Langhorne sisters of Virginia. One sister married Charles Dana Gibson and was the original Gibson Girl, another married Lord Astor and was the famous Lady Astor, M.P., and the third married Joyce’s father.

  Very few theatrical photos on the wall. The one she’s proudest of is the Haymarket marquee with her name in lights. The Haymarket had a rule against putting a star’s name in lights, it only lights the name of the show. But when Joyce did her one-man show there, she wasn’t just the star, she was the show.

  She gave me a biography of Florence Nightingale she thinks I’ll like. She sets her alarm for six every morning and reads in bed till seven; she said if she hadn’t formed that habit, she’d never find time to read anything. As it is, it seems to me she’s read everything.

  I’m always so ashamed when I discover how well-read other people are and how ignorant I am in comparison. If you saw the long list of famous books and authors I’ve never read you wouldn’t believe it. My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I’m reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realize I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

  After dinner they drove me around Chelsea and showed me the house where they were married. Joyce told me they were almost childhood sweethearts.

  “I was seventeen and Reggie was just down from Oxford. The first time I played tennis with him I still wore my hair in a braid, I only put it up in the evening.”

  They drove down into the old City of London and showed me St. Mary-Le-BOW’s Church, it now turns out you spell it. Only the English could tack “bow” onto “le.” Too dark for me to see where I went wrong.

  They kept up an amiable running argument about what to show me.

  “Oh, not St. Paul’s, dear, she’ll have seen that.”

  “She might like to see it illuminated, RegGEE!”

  “She’s probably seen it illuminated half a dozen times, why don’t you show her Fleet Street?”

  I piped up from the back seat that I’d like to see London’s slums.

  “I’m afraid,” said Joyce gently, “there aren’t any.”

  Add that fact to Britain’s free medical care and you know all you need to know about the difference between Capitalism and Socialism.

  Wednesday, July 14

  Ann Edwards of the Sunday Express took me to lunch at the Savoy and refused to believe I wasn’t disappointed in London.

  “When I heard you were coming,” she said, “I wanted to write you and say, ‘My dear, don’t come. You’re fifteen years too late.’”

  For what, Westminster Abbey?

  I tried to tell her that if you’ve dreamed of seeing the Abbey and St. Paul’s and the Tower all your life, and one day you find yourself actually there, they can’t disappoint you. I told her I was finally going to St. Paul’s when I left her and I could guarantee her it wouldn’t disappoint me. But she’s lived in London all her life, she harks back wistfully to the days when her family owned an upright Rolls-Royce, “which, every time it started, coughed gently, like a discreet footman.”

  The Savoy River Room is beautiful and the food marvelous. (I liked Claridge’s better but I romanticize Claridge’s.) Had crabmeat and lobster thermidor both, couldn’t eat my way through either, the portions were enormous. I finished up with strawberries and cream all the same. English cream is addictive—and every time I eat strawberries here I think of the English clergyman who remarked:

  “Doubtless God could have made a better berry than the strawberry and doubtless God never did.”

  She walked down along the Embankment with me after lunch and pointed me the straightest route to St. Paul’s.

  It was lovely to walk along the river with John Donne’s cathedral looming ahead. Thought about him as I walked, he’s the only man I ever heard of who actually was a rake reformed by the love of a good woman. He eloped with the daughter of the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower and her outraged papa had them thrown into the Tower for it. John was in one wing, his bride was in another, and he sent her a note, which is how I know he pronounced his name Dunn, not Donn. The note read:

  John Donne

  Anne Donne

  Undone.

  He was also a little batty. When Anne died, he had a stone shroud made for himself, and he slept with that shroud in bed with him for twenty years. If you write like an angel, you’re allowed to be a bit cracked.

  I walked up the steps of St. Paul’s—finally, finally, after how many years?—and in through the doorway, and stood there looking up at the domed ceiling and down the broad aisles to the altar, and tried to imagine how Donne felt the night King James sent for him. And for at least that moment, I wouldn’t have traded the hundreds of books I’ve never read for the handful I know almost by heart. I haven’t opened Watson’s Lives in ten years, at least; and standing there in John Donne’s cathedral the whole lovely passage was right there in my head:

  When his Majesty was sat down he said after his pleasant manner, “Dr. Donne, I have invited you to dinner and though you sit not down with me, yet will I carve to you a dish I know you love well. For knowing you love London I do hereby make you Dean of St. Pauls and when I have dined, then do you take your beloved dish home with you to your study, say grace there to yourself and much good may it do you.”

  And as Eliza Dolittle would say, I bet I got it right.

  There were guides with large tourist parties in tow, each guide giving the standard lecture, some in English, one in French, one in German, the monotone voices jarring against each other. I got as far from them as I could and wandered around by myself. I went down a side aisle looking at all the plaques and busts, walked around the altar and started back up the other side looking at more plaques and busts. Even so, I almost missed it. It was an odd shape, it wasn’t a bust and it wasn’t a full-length statue, so I stopped and read the inscription. There in front of me, hanging on the wall of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was John Donnes shroud.

  I touched it.

  There’s a small chapel just inside the door, with a sign that says: “St. Dunstan’s Chapel. Reserved for Private Meditation.” I went in and gave thanks.

  Fifteen years too late indeed.

  Thursday, July 15

  Ken Ellis of the London Reader’s Digest came around this morning with his pretty assistant and a photographer, to take my picture. I put up the usual squawk but my heart wasn’t in it (I’d be flying over the Atlantic this minute if it weren’t for the Digest) and I trotted meekly back to 84 Charing Cross Road with them and had my picture taken sitting on the window sill of the bleak, empty upstairs room. Ken scooped up all the peeled and rusting white letters that once spelled Marks & Co. for me. I want to take them home.

  (And one September day when I’m doing my fall cleaning I’ll come on them and ask myself, “What do you want these for—so you can weep over them when you’re an old lady?” and throw them out.)

  They took me to Wheeler’s for lunch (the famous seafood restaurant everybody takes you to) and Ken explained to me why everybody over here hates the new money. It has to do with the Englishman’s need to be different. The
decimal system is much simpler than the old ha’penny-tupenny-guinea-tenner-tanner system, but the old money was theirs; no other country had it and nobody else could understand it. He said they hate entering the Common Market for the same reason. They don’t want to be part-of-Europe, they want to be separate, different, set apart. He illustrated this by quoting an old headline which has become a cliché joke over here. During a spell of bad weather when the whole island was enveloped in fog, one English newspaper headline read: FOG ISOLATES CONTINENT.

  I’m having dinner with the Elys and Jean just called to warn me that the Connaught is very old-world and still doesn’t admit women in pants to the dining room, told her with dignity I have two dresses.

  11 p.m.

  The Connaught is near Grosvenor Square so I went there first to see the Roosevelt Memorial. Somebody told me that after Roosevelt’s death the British government decided to raise money for the Memorial by public subscription and to limit individual contributions to one shilling so that everyone could subscribe. They announced that the subscription would be kept open as long as necessary to raise all the money in one-shilling contributions.

  The subscription closed in seventy-two hours.

  The story moved me a lot more than the Memorial did. It’s a statue of FDR standing tall, holding a cane, cape flying. The features are there; the character and personality are entirely absent. And I resent a statue of FDR standing on legs that were shriveled and useless throughout his White House life. You can’t take the measure of Roosevelt if you ignore the fact that his immense achievements were those of a man paralyzed from the waist down. I’d carve him sitting, with the blanket he always spread over his knees to hide the withered legs. Anything else belittles the gallantry and humor in that indomitable face. Since the gallantry and humor are missing from the statue’s face I don’t suppose it matters. It’s nice to know so many Englishmen loved him, anyway.