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Hanff, Helene

84, Charing Cross Road, [24] 55; article republished, [48] 14

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20091201100758

We All Love Your Letters . . .

Maggie Fergusson on Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road

I thought I could never feel fond of Charing Cross Road. In 1988, when I was 23, I spent the most miserable three months of my life there. In one fell swoop, I had lost my fiancé, my flat and my job. (In a panic, as university came to an end, I had started my working life as a graduate trainee in a City bank. It was not a good move.) Facing what felt like a futureless future, I signed up for a ‘Sight and Sound’ typing course on the bleak first floor of a building next to the Garrick Theatre. Secretarial instruction was delivered over headphones to classrooms full of women, and, as I tried to follow the disembodied tutorials, my fingers kept slipping and jamming between the keys of a hefty, black manual typewriter. As I emerged at lunch-time, and wandered towards Soho Square to eat a sandwich, surrounded by shoals of down-and-outs and drunks, I kept thinking of that line from The Waste Land: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’.
20151201162940

A Literary Love Affair

Maggie Fergusson, Preface to Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

I thought I could never feel fond of Charing Cross Road. In 1988, when I was 23, I spent a miserable three months there doing a ‘Sight and Sound’ typing course on the bleak first floor of a building next to the Garrick Theatre. Secretarial instruction was delivered over headphones to classrooms full of women and as I tried to follow the disembodied tutorials my fingers kept slipping and jamming between the keys of a hefty, black manual typewriter.

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