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

and asked if the brown-and-white scarf came from Harrods. (I borrowed it off the cocktail dress.)
    He said as we drove that we wouldn’t be able to go through Windsor Castle after all, “the Queen’s in residence,” but we would stop at Windsor for sherry with two elderly sisters, he thought I’d find them and their house delightful.
    On the way to Windsor there’s a Home for Tired Horses. Their owners visit them on Sundays and bring them cream buns.
    Windsor is full of casual anachronisms. The sisters live on a seventeenth-century street in one of a row of Queen Anne houses, each with a car parked at the curb and a TV antenna sticking out of the roof. PB parked at the back of the house by the rose garden and we were met there by the dominant sister, who cut a pink rose for me to wear and took us into the house and along a narrow old-fashioned hall to the living room, where the shy sister met us. The shy sister poured sherry and both of them regretfully informed PB that their ghost had gone.
    The ghost was living in the house when they bought it twenty years ago and he stayed on. He was very quiet and no trouble most of the time. But he liked the house to be lived in, he liked people about; and every time the sisters packed up for a trip and made arrangements to close the house, theghost went berserk with fury. Pictures were knocked off the walls, wine glasses went hurtling off the sideboard and broke, lamps crashed to the floor, pots and pans went clattering and banging round the kitchen all night long. The rampage lasted till the sisters left for their holiday. For twenty years, this happened every time they went up to London during the season or into the country or abroad. This year, for the first time, the sisters made plans to go away, they packed for the trip—and the house remained silent. The pictures and wine glasses and lamps were undisturbed, the kitchen was quiet, the ghost had gone. The sisters were rather sad about it, they’d got fond of him.
    One of the sisters took me up to the top-floor bathroom to look out the window. They run up there to see whether the Queen has arrived. From the bathroom window you can see the Windsor Castle flagpole. If the Queen’s in residence the flag is flying.
    They apologized for not giving us lunch, they were going to watch Philip play polo.
    PB and I picnicked on the Windsor lawn. He (or the daily) had packed a basket with three kinds of sandwiches, a thermos of iced tea, peaches and cookies—and after-dinner mints, I love him to death, there’s an Edwardian finishing touch to everything he does. Like the china ashtray he keeps on the front ledge of his car, he obviously doesn’t care for the tin one that comes built in.
    There’s a footbridge connecting Windsor and Eton. PB wore his Eton tie, and the gate keeper saw it and said, “You’re an Eton man, sir!” and let us into rooms not open to tourists.
    If you’re born in the U.S. with a yearning love of classical scholarship and no college education, you are awed by a school in which for centuries boys have learned to read and write Greek and Latin fluently by the time they’re in their teens. PB took me into the original classroom, five hundred years old, and made me sit at one of the desks. They’re dark, heavy oak, thickly covered with boys’ initials scratched into the wood with pocket knives. Five hundred years’ worth of boys’ initials is something to see.
    We went into the chapel where the senior boys worship, there’s a roll book hanging from the aisle pew of each row so that every boy’s presence can be checked off by a monitor. We read the names in one—“Harris Major. Harris Minor. Harris Tertius”—Eton never does in English what it can do in Latin.
    Along the hall outside the classrooms the high oak walls have names cut into them as thickly as the initials in the desks. PB told me when a boy graduates he