Sharing the Time with 84 Charing Cross Road

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Thoughts about watching 84 Charing Cross Road starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins....

I watched 84 Charing Cross Road expecting a pleasant movie about books and letters. It was that. But somewhere around 1951, I became aware that I was there too.

I was three years old, living a very different life from Helene Hanff in New York or Frank Doel in London. I have no memory of their streets or their bookshop. Still, while Helene was writing letters across the ocean and Frank was hunting down books for her, I was somewhere in Louisiana and Arkansas, busy being three. We were sharing the same time.

The film makes space for the ordinary things. Helene wants a particular book. Frank finds it, or can’t find it, and writes back. Helene sends parcels of food to the Marks & Co booksellers in London, where meat is still rationed years after the war. Someone passes along a bit of news. People go home to their families. Years go by, and another letter turns up. Nothing happens quickly but the friendship becomes real.

I thought about the adults of my childhood. While those letters traveled back and forth, the people I knew were going to work, making supper, raising children, and wondering what the next year would bring. None of them knew what their lives would become. They were all part of one present, though they would never know one another.

I found it touching and expansive. The movie made that time feel open again. It's details were so present that I could almost step into them. I don’t have a tidy name for what I felt. It was partly nostalgia, though I wasn’t wishing to go back. I wasn’t remembering things in any clear way, either. I was recognizing that I had been there and that my life and theirs had overlapped.

For a couple of hours, 1951 didn’t feel terribly far away. The people on the screen were living their ordinary lives, the people I loved were living theirs, and I was there among them, just beginning mine.

It's a good movie, filmed in 1984 and available on YouTube. I recommend it

Janis @ Maison Tranquille

Still Curious. Still Growing. Still Grateful.