Her time in London allows her to finally explore the city she had dreamt of for so long: “the England of English literature”. The edition I read happily also includes Hanff’s follow-up, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which chronicles her first trip to London, nearly 25 years after she started writing to Frank Doel. I desperately wanted to meet these two mid-20th century pen pals, corresponding across the Atlantic through letters, books and food. I read it while journeying home, and felt, immediately, that I had found my people.
I didn’t pick it up in time, but I took it down from my friend Liv’s bookshelves last week. Very quickly I felt certain that I would be here indefinitely I had found the place I was supposed to be.īefore I visited California recently, someone recommended I find a copy of 84, Charing Cross Road, a series of letters between a New York bibliophile and a London man working in an antiquarian bookshop.
And, despite feeling homesick for my family in Brisbane, it really did. I had formed such a clear image of it in my head and knew, somehow, that it was going to feel like home. I had dreamt of it my entire life: of visiting the park where the Darling children played, the streets the Artful Dodger ran down, the station that gave Paddington Bear his name.
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