"Coo!" Said Mrs. Hunkle

When Reporter Sam Boal got to London, he realized that "the people of America don't know a damn thing about the people of England." So the correspondent of Manhattan's tabloid, laborite Post decided to report the British through British eyes. The eyes he chose were those of his widowed, Cockney charlady, old (65), worked-bowed Mrs. Hunkle. This week, readers of Boal's twice-a-week column were seeing the U.S. through those same Cockney eyes. Boal had brought Mrs. Hunkle back with him, took her along on a Hollywood vacation where everything from elaborate hot-dog stands to film-colony eccentricities evoked her astonished Cockney "Coo !"

In London Sam Boal had taken her to the King's birthday party (though he hadn't been able to get her an invitation), stood beside her in slow-moving shopping queues, spent hours with her at her corner pub:

We had another gin, although Mrs. Hunkle protested she would get "tiddly" and then I walked her home. In her miserable little 90-cent room with its gas fire and no other heat, Mrs. Hunkle took off her atrocious hat and sat down. I didn't, since there was only one chair.

"Well," she said, "here 'tis Christmas again and I haven't got any presents for you, sir."

I said I had everything, and she thought this over for a moment and agreed. "Yes, Americans have everything but there's always someone worse off," she said. "Everything's a fight, you know, sir."

She gat up and I knew perfectly well what she was going to give me, but there was nothing I could do to stop her. She gave me her egg and said "Merry Christmas" and I said I didn't want the egg. She said "Don't be silly. Americans eat a lot of eggs, don't they?"

U.S. readers were so taken by Mrs. Hunkle's foodless plight and her generosity that they sent her 400 pounds of eatables.

Come Work with Me. Young (33), puckish Correspondent Sam Boal had come up through a succession of routine newspaper jobs. Back from a wartime OWI assignment, he was sounding off about bad foreign-news coverage at a Manhattan cocktail party. The Post's Editor Ted Thackrey heard him, said: "If you're so damn good, come down and work for me." That was a year and a half ago. Now Thackrey calls Boal "one of the best men we have," gives him a free hand and $250 a week (including expenses). But Sam Boal is glad to give Mrs. Hunkle her due. Says he: "When I used to write those brilliant pieces about politics, nobody would ever acknowledge that I had written anything. But when I write about that old bag we get a stack of mail."

In Hollywood last week, the Old Bag was indeed bringing in the mail. In a recent column, Boal had answered a question he had often been asked: Is Mrs. Hunkle real? Wrote he: "Sure she exists . . . she lives in perhaps 500,000 houses in London or Manchester or Leeds. . . . I didn't invent her. I merely tried to describe her." ,

In a few weeks, when Mrs. Hunkle has cooed her fill at Hollywood (and Boal has recovered from a London auto accident), he will return with her to England, continue to report the British through the eyes of a charlady he "dreamed up one morning when I had a hangover and didn't want to write anything heavy."

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