13、April 10,1950

                        14 East  94th St.
                        April 10, 1950

Dear Cecily —
    And a very bad cess to Old Mr. Martin,
tell him I’m so unstudious I never even
went to college. I just happen to have
peculiar tasete in books, thanks to a
Cambridge professor named Quiller-Couch,
known as Q, whom I fell over in a library
when I was 17. And I’m about as
smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler. I
live in moth-eaten sweaters and wool slacks,
they don’t give us any heat here in the
daytime. It’s a 5-story brownstone and all
the other tenants go out to work at 9 A.M.
and don’t come home till 6 — and why should
the landlord heat the building for one small
script-reader/writer working at home on the
ground floor?
    Poor Frank, I give him such a hard time,
I’m always bawling him out for something.
I’m only teasing, but I know he’ll take me
seriously. I keep trying to puncture that
proper British reserve, if he gets ulcers I
did it.
    Please write and tell me about London,
I live for the day when I step off the
boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks
under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley
Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in
St. Paul’s where John Donne preached and 
sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she
refused to enter the Tower, and like that.
A newspaper man I know, who was stationed
in London during the war, says tourists go 
to England with preconceived notions, so
they always find exactly what they go
looking for. I told him I’d go looking for
the England of English literature, and he
said:
    “Then it’s there.”
                            Regards—
                            Helene Hanff

注释：
Cambridge 剑桥
Broadway 百老汇大街
moth-eaten 虫蛀的，破旧的
5-story 5层楼
script-reader/writer 剧本读者/作家
Berkeley Square 伯克利广场
Wimpole Street 温波尔街
St. Paul 圣保罗大教堂
Elizabeth 伊丽莎白