"If I live to be very old, all my memories of the glory days will grow vague and confused, till I won't be certain any of it really happened. But the books will be there, on the shelves and in my head - the only enduring reality I can be certain of till the day I die."

 

To read the book "84 Charing Cross Road", click here
To read its sequel "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street", click here

 

I could've written the above quote, except I didn't - Helene Hanff did! Of course, you know her: she of the book "84 Charing Cross Road" which was also made into a charming film starring Anthony Hopkins as Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers, located at the eponymous address in London.

It's an epistolary novel and perhaps not to your liking , so why not go straight to its sequel "The Duchess of Bloomsbury", after which, I am sure, you will be hooked and continue with "Q's Legacy", in which Helene Hanff recalls her serendipitous discovery of a volume of lectures by a Cambridge don, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. She devoured Q’s book, and, wanting to read all the books he recommended, began to order them from a small store in London, at 84 Charing Cross Road.

 

 

She first contacted the shop in 1949 and it fell to Frank Doel to fulfil her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship developed between the two and between Helene Hanff and other staff members as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts and food parcels to help with the post-World War II food shortages in Britain. Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the coronation of Elizabeth II. Helene Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Frank Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed in December 1970. Helene Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street".

 

 

Having already dedicated her first book "84 Charing Cross Road" to "F.P.D. In Memoriam" (in which F.P.D., of course, stands for Frank Percy Doel), Helene Hanff wrote "Q's Legacy" "In grateful memory of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - Not to pay a debt but to acknowledge it".

While I don't necessarily share Helene Hanff's antiquarian taste in books - of the many books she ordered from Marks & Co, I only read "The Wind in the Willows" - I do share her passion for books. They are the only enduring reality I can be certain of till the day I die.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. Regular readers of this blog will by now have joined the Internet Archive which stores some 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio recordings, and 6 million videos. If you haven't done so yet, do it now! It's easy, and it's FREE! Click here.

 

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.”

 

Read Richard Dawkins' book "Unweaving the Rainbow" online at www.archive.org

 

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?" (click here)

 

 

I am trying to pique your appetite for wonder with these words written by the visionary and often controversial (which is the social fate of every visionary) British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Hate him or love him, he's got a strong point of view and is not afraid to voice it.

 

 

It's not an easy read but nothing important ever is. Try and stay with it for the first dozen pages. If you're not totally hooked by then, you can always go back to your favourite comic book. WOW! OH! ... BAM!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

My family tree is more like a bonzai

 

My parents in Berlin in 1948

 

I blame two wars - the World War from 1939 to 1945, and the domestic family war which led to my parents' divorce in 1952 - for not having much of a family tree; in fact, the only "branch" there ever was and which I climbed were my grandfather's knees shortly before he died in the early 50s.

 

Moi in der Augustastraße in Berlin in 1948

 

I was a less-than-welcome "Peter-come-lately", born at the end of the war - after my "big brother" (1932), and three sisters (1934, 1940, and 1942) - in what was then the Russian-occupied "Ostzone" which in 1949 became the "German Democratic Republic". We had already escaped the "Workers' Paradise" the year before, during the Berlin Blockade, and joined the long queue of destitute refugees in West Germany waiting for anything, including housing. Back in the East, my father had been a "Volkswirt" (economist) with his own large entry in the telephone book; in the West we didn't even have a house, let alone a telephone.

 

 

For the first two years we lived "on the edge" in an unheated metal shack without toilet, kitchen, electricity, or running water, literally on the edge of town, that town being Braunschweig in the more benignly British-occupied Lower Saxony from where I eventually emigrated.

That was still fifteen years away. In the meantime, it was an ongoing battle for adequate housing, enough food, and warm clothing. Nothing like today's claimed "poverty" sitting in front of a flatscreen television; that was real hunger and cold nights and shoes with cardboard soles.

 

My first day at school in 1952

 

If this photo is anything to go by, things must've got a bit better by the time I entered school in 1952. Not that schooling ever interfered with my education: all I ever did were the compulsorary eight years of "Volksschule" (primary school), after which even the few Deutschmarks I earnt as an articled clerk helped to keep our bodies and souls together.

 

"Mein erster Schulgang" - My first day at school / Wouldn't it be fascinating to
know what happened to those forty-one eager faces in the past seventy years?

 

Ask me about geometree, symmetree, and treegonometree, but not about my family tree which is more like a bonzai which is like Chinese foot-binding except it's applied to a tree. Like foot-binding, my family tree kept me hobbling along for nineteen years until I hit my stride in my adopted new home Australia.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)

 

 

Uncertainty is a universal human predicament: 'the future’s not ours to see', as this song, popular in the 1950s, put it. In Germany, a whole generation grew up with the refrain in their ears - in German, of course: ""Was kann schöner sein / Viel schöner als Ruhm und Geld? / Für mich gibt's auf dieser Welt / Doch nur dich allein! / Was kann schöner sein?"

 

 

And what could've been more uncertain than growing up in post-war Germany? Perhaps that's why this song was so popular: it reflected resignation, acceptance, sometimes even optimism about the future; in any case, its fatalism made light of the dark situation we all were in.

Even after the more existential worries have been taking care of - food, a roof over our head, a job, etc. - we still worry. I certainly did as no period of my life was ever totally free of dread-filled apprehensions.

What we seldom ever get around to doing – once the dreaded event is past – is to pause and compare the scale of the worry with what actually happened in the end. We are too taken up with the next topic of alarm ever to return for a "worry audit". If we did, a strange realisation would dawn on us: that our worries are nearly always completely – and deeply – out of line with reality. Extended out across a year, such a "worry audit" would, I am sure, yield similar conclusions. Perhaps the world is not – for all its dangers – as awful as we presume. Perhaps most of the drama is ultimately unfolding only in our own minds.

Looking back over a lifetime of worrying about the future, it helps to remember Mark Twain’s famous dictum: ‘I have lived through many disasters; only a few of which actually happened’. "Que Sera, Sera."

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

How many times can one watch 'Casablanca'?

 

 

Retirement would be a lot harder, were it not for ABC Radio National, my large collection of books, and my equally large collection of movies, but how many times can one watch even as good a film as 'Casablanca'?

Radio National gets me through the night when sleep won't come, and my growing number of unread books give me something to look forward to, while those timeless movies of yesteryears are a welcome relief from TV's tedious cooking shows and home renovation programs (not to mention 'Midsomer Murders' with its endless supply of dead bodies).

It's the beginning of another beautiful day in retirement and I might watch 'Casablanca" for just one more time.