Dear Cecily:
And a vey bad cess to old Mr.Martin, tell him I’m so unstudious I never even went to college.I just happen to have peculiar taste in books, thanks to a Cambridge professor named Quiller-Couch, know as Q,whom I felt over in a library when I was 17. and I am about as smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler.I live in moth-eaten sweaters and wood slacks, they don’t give us any heat here in the daytime.It’s a5 story brownstone and all the other tenants go out to work at 9:00am. and don’t come home till 6- and why shoulf the landlord heat the building for one small scrip-reader/writer working at home on the ground floor?
Poor frank,i give him such a hard time,I’m always bawing him out for something.I am only teasing, but I know he’ll take me seriously.I keep trying to puncture that proper British reserve, if he gets ulcers I did it.
Please write and tell me about London,i live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down wimpole Street and stand in St.Paul’s where John Donne preached and sit on tthe step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. a newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for.I told him I’d go looking for the England of English literature,and he said:
“then it’s there.”
Regards-
Helene Hanff
