TRAVEL

No 84, Charing Cross

Sauntering through Charing Cross Road in London, MADHAVI S MAHADEVAN was not successful in finding No 84. But as she notes, the road is still the Mecca for book lovers.

It’s Helene Hanff I have to thank for this particular journey. I was fifteen when I read 84, Charing Cross Road. Like countless readers around the globe, I was charmed. I read it in one sitting. It’s a small book. But it made a big decision for me. When I embarked on my trip around the world, Charing Cross road would be on the itinerary. Twenty five years later, I stand outside Leicester Square Tube Station and consider the length of the road I am about to travel.

Charing Cross, the spot from which the road gets its name, lies south, across Trafalgar Square. The ‘cross’ marked one of the twelve places where the funeral cortege of Queen Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I, rested on its way to Westminster Abbey is 1290. That stone cross is long gone. On its site, a fish shop was established.

This in turn was pulled down during the Restoration, when eight regicides were executed here. Half a dozen years later, it was the venue for a happier event - a Punch and Judy show given by an Italian puppeteer. It is said to be the first of such shows given in England. At Charing Cross proclamations were read and offenders pilloried. In seventeenth century London, it was the place where you went if you wanted the latest gossip. In Johnson’s words, “the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross”. This afternoon, the same could be said of Charing Cross Road. It was built to link Trafalgar Square to St Giles Circus in the north, in the late 1800s when most of this locality was an overcrowded slum. Today, it is a narrow overcrowded road, jam-packed with pedestrians, lined with cafes and second hand bookshops.

84, Charing Cross Road is a book about books. The love of old books drew New York based writer Helene Hanff’s attention to an advertisement in the Saturday Review of Literature for an antiquarian bookstore in London, at 84, Charing Cross Road. The place was called Marks and Co. It seemed to have all the old books she loved but could never find. She ordered her first batch of books- essays by William Hazlitt and RL Stevenson - in early October 1949. The delivery took nearly a month, but it kicked off twenty years of regular correspondence.

The letters between her and Frank Doel, who filled up the orders, form the substance of the book. The letters are short, funny, often touching. They reaffirm the power of the written word to touch the lives of people. I can vouch for that. I remember diligently noting down the name of every title mentioned in Helene Hanff’s book. Her taste was eclectic but, at fifteen, it seemed to me terribly high brow. Plato went mostly over my head. Pepys I couldn’t even pronounce right. But Jane Austen and Hillaire Belloc became my firm friends.

At the corner of Great Newport Street Quintos. I push open the green painted door. The smell and touch of yellowed pages and leather bound tomes immediately tells you this is an antiquarian bookstore. ‘Is this Number 84?’ I ask the man at the counter. No, he says adding, ‘We are actually Number 48. But we are asked that question all the time.”

It isn’t, but it could well be Number-84. The wooden floor is uncarpeted, the tall shelves are plain and functional. The books look as if they were printed along with Gutenberg’s Bible. There is no catalogue. Handwritten notices - Military History, Poetry, Architecture, Travel - signpost you to the right direction. Crime, Cookery, Children lie in the basement. A tramp down a precarious staircase leads into a warren of rooms. Cold, dank, narrow rooms, smelling of must and dust. The walls are lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, A naked bulb from a cord provides barely sufficient light. With just a preliminary glance I know I’ve hit pay dirt: Ross McDonald, Cyril Hare, Peter Cheyney, Julian Symons. The Cookery shelf yields more goodies: a culinary history, a Mediterranean cookbook, a book about the evolution of kitchens and three dinky booklets on honey, garlic and tofu. The Children’s shelf holds the entire set of Billy Bunters and a Winnie-the-Pooh omnibus. And then- voila!-tucked away in a corner I spy two bound volumes of Schoolgirl comics. They’ve been out of print for decades. The price tag makes me wish that I had preserved my stock; there’s a gold mine in this stuff.

Specialty bookshops are a feature of Charing Cross road. There is a store called Murder One. It is the largest bookstore in Europe devoted entirely to crime, horror, fantasy and science fiction. Next to Murder One is Comics Showcase, for the serious comics buff. There is also Sportspages, obviously all about sportswriting. Then there is Silver Moon, two floors of books about women’s issues and women’s writing. And Al-Hoda, which houses books devoted to Islamic studies.But perhaps the most famous bookshop on Charing Cross Road, besides No 84, of course, is the one at Nos 119-125. Foyles is the biggest bookshop in London. Five floors. Miles of shelves. Millions of books. It was opened by two brothers, William and Gilbert Foyle, sons of a Shoreditch grocer, who having failed their Civil Services tried to sell off their textbooks. The response they received showed large a market for such books there was. They began as a home business, setting second hand books using handwritten catalogues that customers were requested to return so that they could be sent to others. In 1903, they moved to Charing Cross Road.

Among the shop’s distinguished customers have been G B Shaw, John Galsworthy, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Masefield, Walt Disney and Noel Coward. If you’re looking for obscure books on any subject or the complete works of a particular author, chances are that this is where you’ll find them. Besides Foyle’s, Charing Cross Road also has branches of Borders and Blackwell's (known for their collection of academic books).

However, Charing Cross Road is not about books alone. There are several theatres, the Garrick, Wyndham and Phoenix. The first two are over a hundred years old. At Cambridge Circus stands the Palace, built in 1892, owned by the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. It is said that the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova made her London debut here. From 1961-69, Rodger’ and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music ran for 2,385 performances. The musical Les Miserables, first staged in 1985, continues to run. With music in the air, it’s only natural that the road be known for its shops selling musical instruments. Zwemmer’s at Nos 76-80 is famous; the gleaming brass trumpets, trombones and tubas in the window-bear testimony.

Helene Hanff’s book was made into a film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. It was also made into a successful play. She wrote other books as well, including the Duchess of Bloomsbury which was a sequel about her visit to London. Helene died in 1997. But generations of readers will continue to come to Charing Cross Road. They will look for Number 84. And discover that Marks and Co is gone. It closed down in 1970. Presently a bar occupies the place.

What remains is a plaque remembering Helene Hanff and the bookstore she made famous. In the last pages of the book is one entry in which Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend on a visit to London: “If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me.” Not being the kissing type, I enter the bar and buy a beer to drink to the memory of Helene Hanff and book lovers across the world. Cheers!