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n a wet autumn day in 1977, my father took me to London. I was 11, and had seldom (if ever) visited the capital. He showed me his favourite spots, reliving his time in London decades before.
As an early dark set in, we were in Covent Garden. The light spilled from Mann Egerton’s car showroom. They were proudly displaying the new Triumph TR7, a car so ugly that even I — a lover of all things automotive — was lost for words.
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• 1977 Triumph
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And then, when we had finished admiring this cow of a car, my father took me to look at a closed-down bookshop.
A year or so earlier, he had come across an odd little paperback that made him laugh inordinately and, when he finished it, frustrated perhaps by whatever childish rubbish I was reading, he gave it to me. It was called 84 Charing Cross Road. It made me laugh, use the dictionary now and again and, ultimately, cry. So here we were, standing in the rain, outside a closed-down bookshop.
The shop front was being used as a display window by the bookshop next door. Much imagination was called for. I pictured those ghostly people who had answered Helene Hanff’s letters in 1949, going about their jobs in the shop. I imagined teeming men with hats and trench-coats, and spluttering prewar cars.
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• 1949 Triumph
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1949 was a different world from 1977. Men wore hats.
Another 28 years has now passed, and I am middle-aged. The moment came, in the last days of the old century, when I turned the corner in the Charing Cross Road and discovered that the old bookshop wasn’t a bookshop any more, but some soulless food-dispensary, one of a chain. Everything is one of a chain now. There aren’t any bookshops left because of people like me, buying their books on the web and plugging Amazon on their web-sites. No good living in the past. Progress, progress. But some things never change: 84 Charing Cross Road is just as fine a book now as it ever was. It doesn’t need a plot or a moral message to deliver a punch. Keep a copy around and you will always have a book you can pick up for pleasure, even on the fifth reading, or the fifteenth. Eighty-four is one of life’s few reassuring certainties.
And here is another. Men might not wear hats any more, but the TR7 will never be a classic.
Angela Garry writes:
The premises at 84 Charing Cross Road were never made into a food shop — you must have stopped at the wrong building, as have hundreds of fans over the years (most of whom have written to me from time to time to ask what’s happening to the premises now). It’s a difficult place to find, as number 80 is several buildings away from the south corner of Cambridge Circus junction, yet number 82 is directly on the corner of the north side of the junction, with number 84 next door. Many people stand outside number 80 on the south side, and wrongly assume that the shop next door is 82 and then that the shop next door to that (Pizza Hut, I think) is 84.
From 1994 to 2000 the shop was the Covent Garden Record Store. Then the building lay empty for two years or so whilst planning permission was being sought, then it was converted along with number 82 and the shop around the corner on Cambridge Circus, into an ‘All Bar One’ wine bar. If she was still alive, I’d like to think Helene would probably approve — she’d be sitting in there with a gin martini, a cigarette and a book to read...
If you have discovered (or if you run) a web-site or page dedicated to Helene Hanff or her work, e-mail the Editor with the URL and it will be included here.
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84 Charing Cross Road