Free The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff Page A

Heathrow for the fun of it.
    â€œIf I see a man and his wife and grown daughters standing together looking a bit out of sorts, I walk up to the man and say: ‘Sir, which of these ladies is your wife?’ And he beams! And she beams!” And the Colonel roars with laughter.
    â€œIf I see a middle-aged couple looking a bit down, you know, I walk up to them and ask: ‘Are you folks on your honeymoon?’ and you ought to see their faces! They know I’m joshing—some of ’em do—but still, y’know, they can’t help being pleased.
    â€œIf I see a child crying—some of them get very tired and upset at a big airport, they’re hungry, they want to be at home—and when I see one crying I walk up and ask the parents if they know where I can find a nice little girl because mine is grown up. And then I discover the little girl who’s crying and I say she’s exactly the sort of little girl I’ve been looking for, and I ask if she’d consider being my little girl.” And he ends each story with that booming laugh of pure pleasure.
    The Cotswolds are just what I always thought they’d be: stretches of green countryside pocketed with English villages that seem not to have changed since the time of Elizabeth I. We had lunch at a pub near a country church where, said the Colonel, “Hampden started the Revolution.”Didn’t have the nerve to tell him I don’t know who Hampden was.
    Stratford is beyond Oxford, we backtrack tomorrow. We passed Oxford road signs and I told him about Great Tew. Years ago, somebody sent me a postcard—a photograph of five thatched cottages falling down a hillside—and wrote on the back:

    This is Great Tew. You can’t find it on the map, you have to get lost on the way to Oxford.

    The photo was so idealized a view of rural England I didn’t believe the village really existed. I used to stare at that postcard by the hour. Kept it for years, stuck in my Oxford English Verse.
    â€œWell!” said the Colonel, inspired by the challenge. “We shall just have to find Great Tew and see if it’s still the same.”
    He wove in and out through the Cotswolds and finally we came to signs pointing to Tew and Little Tew and rounded a curve and there was Great Tew, looking exactly as it had looked on my postcard: five ancient stone houses with thatched roofs, still falling down the hillside. The Colonel said they date back to Henry VIII. Five hundred years later they’re still lived in: there were white curtains and flower boxes at the windows, and every front lawn had a rose garden.
    He parked the car—the only car in sight—and we got out. Down the road from the cottages was the village’s only other building, a one-room General Store and Post Office.We went in. There was no one in there but the woman who runs it, and we hadn’t seen a soul outside.
    The Colonel bought ice cream, I asked for a glass of milk and was handed a quart bottle and a straw. The Colonel told the proprietress that I had come “all the way from New York” and had “particularly asked to see Great Tew.” While they talked I was clutching the quart bottle entirely preoccupied with trying to get at least half a pint of it inside me so as not to hurt her feelings. When I’d drunk that much I looked around for an inobtrusive place to park the bottle, and discovered that the store had suddenly filled up with people—men in country caps and women in print dresses. I moved out of their way and they all stepped up to the counter and bought cigarettes and newspapers. A few children came in and were promptly shooed out by the proprietress.
    The Colonel finished his ice cream, took my milk bottle off my hands and disposed of a pint and a half of milk as if it were a glass of water, and we left.
    â€œWell!” he said as we walked back to the car. “We’ve given them something to talk about