In the sixth of our Lent series in which writers look again at a book that brought them light in a time of darkness, The Tablet’s literary editor recalls an unlikely love story of quiet tenderness that refreshed her appetite for life

I thought I could never feel fond of Charing Cross Road. In 1988, when I was 23, I spent the most miserable three months of my life there. In one fell swoop, I had lost my fiancé, my flat and my job (in a panic, as university came to an end, I started my working life as a graduate trainee in a City bank: a bad move). Thinking that the best I could hope for was to lose myself in a typing pool, I signed up for a “Sight and Sound” course on the bleak first floor of a building next to the Garrick Theatre.

Secretarial instruction was delivered to classrooms full of women over headphones and, as I tried to follow the disembodied tutorials, my fingers kept slipping and jamming between the keys of a hefty, black, manual typewriter. At lunchtime, wandering towards Soho Square to eat a sandwich, I felt surrounded by shoals of down-and-outs. I kept thinking of Eliot watching commuters drift over London Bridge: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”