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

pays a few shillings to the college to have his name carved in the wall. We saw Pitt’s name and Shelley’s (and PB showed me his own). You could spend a month crawling up and down the walls looking for names.
    Heart-rending plaques to Eton’s war dead. One family lost eight men in World War I, seven of them in their twenties. The Grenfells (Joyce Grenfell’s husband’s family) lost grandfather, father and one son—and six men in the Boer War a dozen years earlier.
    We went outside and saw the playing fields where all those wars were supposedly won. Boys were playing cricket, a few strolled by swinging tennis rackets. On Saturdays theboys are allowed to wear ordinary sports clothes but we saw several in the Eton uniform: black tail coat, white shirt, striped trousers. PB says they don’t wear the top hat any more except on state occasions. (Those top hats kept the boys out of trouble. If an Eton boy tried to sneak into an off-limits pub or movie, the manager could spot that top hat from anywhere in the house and throw him out.)
    The faces of the boys are unbelievably clean and chiseled and beautiful. And the tail coats—which must have looked outlandish in the 1940’s and 50’s—look marvelously appropriate with the long hair the boys wear now. What with the cameo faces, the long hair brushed to a gleam and perfectly cut tails, they looked like improbable Edwardian princes.
    We drove back to London at four; PB wanted to take me through Marlborough House and it closes at five. We drove to Marlborough House but couldn’t go through it, the guard explained the house is closed for cleaning. The Royal Chapel is open, and PB told me to go to services there one Sunday. He said it’s never crowded or touristy since few people know it’s open to the public. Queen Mary was married there, so I’m going, out of affection for her and Pope-Hennessy.

Later
    Laura Davidson just phoned from Oxford. She wrote me a fan letter telling me her husband, a Swarthmore professor, was working at Balliol for a year and that they and their fifteen-year-old son were fans of the book and wanted me to come to Oxford. I wrote back and told her when I was coming to London and she actually rescheduled a Paris vacation just so she’d be in Oxford when I came. When I picked up the phone just now and said hello, she said:
    â€œHi, it’s Laura Davidson, how are you, when are you coming to Oxford? My son is dying of suspense.”
    We settled on next Friday. She said there are trains almost every hour, call and let her know which one I’m on and she’ll meet it. She’ll carry the book so I’ll know her.
    I’m paranoid enough about traveling when I’m home and healthy, and the prospect of strange railroad stations and train trips over here kind of wears me out. But Oxford I have to see. There’s one suite of freshman’s rooms at Trinity College which John Donne, John Henry Newman and Arthur Quiller-Couch all lived in, in various long-gone eras. Whatever I know about writing English those three men taught me, and before I die I want to stand in their freshman’s rooms and call their names blessed.
    Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge.
    â€œJust what I need!” I congratulated myself. I hurriedhome with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag:
    Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed that his students—including me—had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the “Invocation to Light” in Book 9. So I said, “Wait here,” and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it