Free The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

Good condition. Reasonable. Contact YWCA, Great Russell St.
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    7 p.m.
    Ena blew in at five-thirty with a brown paper bag full of lemons, honey and lime juice for my cough. She said she hadan urge all morning to call me and hang on the phone but felt shy about it; I said we’re both too inhibited. She wanted me to have dinner with them tomorrow night. I told her I’d be in Stratford but would be back Friday, and her face fell.
    â€œWe go down to the country on Friday and we won’t be back until the tenth!” she said.
    â€œNever mind,” I said. “I have every intention of lasting till the fifteenth.”
    She looked distressed.
    â€œYou can’t go home that soon! We’ve only just met you!” she said. “Look, when you run out of money why don’t you go down and stay at our place in the country? We shan’t be using it at all after the tenth, you could stay there all summer—if you don’t mind our coming down weekends?” peering at me anxiously. People unhinge me.
    She just left to meet Leo at his mother’s.
    The BOAC bag arrived, and I phoned the Colonel and thanked him. He advised me to eat a lot:
    â€œYou must always feed a cold. If you don’t give the germs food to eat they’ll feed on you.”
    Will now go down to the dining room and feed the germs.
    Later
    I ordered “Chicken Maryland,” which turned out to be a slice of chicken, breaded and fried flat like a veal cutlet, accompanied by a strip of bacon and a fat sausage. Dessert was “Coupe Jamaica,” I didn’t order it but the couple at the next table did: a long, narrow cookie sticking up out of aball of vanilla ice cream that rested on a slice of canned pineapple. It would probably confuse Jamaica as much as the chicken would confuse Maryland. But somebody once told me there’s a restaurant in Paris that lists on the menu “Pommes à la French Fries."

Thursday, July 1
    Stratford             
    Midnight             
    I’m writing this in bed, in a luxurious motel room: wall-to-wall carpet, easy chair, TV set, dressing table and a beautiful adjoining bath in mauve tile, life at the Kenilworth was never like this.
    I tell you my Colonel has got to be the world’s kindest, most considerate man. We left London in the usual gray weather, it gets to you after a while; I told him I was beginning to crave sunshine the way a thirsty man craves water. We drove into the Cotswolds and about mid-morning the weather cleared and the sun came out briefly. The minute it did, he pulled over to the side of the road, got a deck chair out of the trunk and set it up on a stretch of grass for me so I could lie in the sun the little while it lasted. He told me his wife died of cancer “after two years of hell”; he must have been marvelous through it.
    We passed Stoke Poges and he told me that’s where Gray’s country churchyard is. Gray’s “Elegy” was my mother’s favorite poem, I’d like to have seen the churchyard but we didn’t have time for the detour.
    As we drove, he told me a long-winded story about a widow he knows who fell in love with a man and was invited to his villa in Italy, and when she got there she found she had no room of her own, the man actually meant her to share his BEDroom, d’ye see, and Well-I-mean-to-say, said the Colonel, she wasn’t aTALL that sort, and it was a shock to find the Bounder wanted only One Thing. I wondered why he told me the story since he didn’t figure in it—andthen it dawned on me that this was his tactful way of assuring me he didn’t expect me to share his bedroom in Stratford. It had never occurred to me; he’s much too strait-laced and old-school, it would have been out of character.
    He told me he retired from publishing to nurse his wife, and after she died he took the job at