Read Online The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff - Free Book Online

and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knowshow many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.
    The Grenfells had got house seats for themselves and the Australians, and when Joyce read I was in town she invited me along—even though it meant Reggie had to give up his house seat to me and go sit in the balcony, I was horrified.
    It’s an experience walking down a theater aisle with a famous theater personality. Every eye in the audience was on her, and when we took our seats you could feel necks craning all over the house.
    Peter Brook’s production initially a shock, half play, half noisy circus. Mrs. G. was immediately entranced; I kept worrying about whether Puck was going to fall off his stilts or drop the plates he was juggling. Halfway through the second act I was suddenly moved, and I thought, “I resent it but I love it.” Stimulates you to death, seeing Shakespeare explode all over a stage like that.
    They drove me home after saying goodbye to the Australians. Joyce drove because it’s a new car and Reggie wanted her to get the feel of it.
    She had a hell of a time in Bloomsbury. The one-way streets here set drivers crazy, you have to go five blocks out of your way to find a street going in the right direction. And she was NOT going to drop me across Shaftsbury Avenue on the wrong corner of Great Russell Street, she would NOT drop me round the corner on Bloomsbury Street, the hotel entrance was on Great Russell and she was By God going to drop me in front of the door. And after zigzagging north and south for half an hour she triumphantly did it and accepted my congratulations graciously.
    She said they’re “going on holiday” but will be back on July 13 for her church dialogue. She has a monthly church dialogue with a minister—on The Nature of Love and The Nature of Beauty and so forth—at a noon service at St. Mary LaBeau’s Church in Cheapside. She said Why don’t I come to the July 13 dialogue and then come to dinner that night and they’ll drive me around to see the sights. I told her I wasn’t certain I’d still be here on the thirteenth, though I’m hoping to last till the fifteenth.
    During the second act, that cold caught up with me. I started to cough and nearly strangled trying to muffle it. I leaned over and whispered to Joyce apologetically:
    â€œI’ve been fighting a cold all weekend.”
    She thought about this a moment and then leaned over and whispered back:
    â€œOh, have it.”
    So I’m having it. Sitting up in bed hacking and snuffling and even that doesn’t depress me. I seem to be living in a state of deep hypnosis, every time I mail a postcard home I could use Euphoria for a return address.

Tuesday, June 29
    I’m in the dining room having my fourth or fifth cup of coffee, feeling the way you feel the first morning of a full-blown cold. I was going to call Leo Marks and cancel dinner but if I stay in the hotel all day I’ll want to get out of it tonight so I’ll keep the date and try not to cough in their faces.
    The dining room’s emptying out now; between eight and nine every morning it’s jammed and the waiters are frantic. The room rate here includes “Full English Breakfast” and we all eat everything: fruit juice or cereal, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, tea or coffee (and the girl who brings the coffee pot asks “Black or white?”).
    The breakfast regulars always include British Willie Lomans in from the country on business and a sprinkling of middle-aged women from all over “the U.K.” traveling alone. (They never say “Great Britain,” it’s “the U.K.”—United Kingdom.) Several pale, pointy-nosed professors are stowing away enough fuel to last them through the day at the British museum, they all look as if they lunch on yogurt.
    This morning, a long table of Scots matrons here for a