"I Shall Tell My Husband"

Riding back to London on the train from Dover, Eleanor Roosevelt knitted busily on a blue and white baby blanket, explaining to reporters that it should have been finished long ago. An English girl reporter, exhausted from the day's trip, finally asked the First Lady if she ever relaxed, slept late, or forgot her obligations. "Not since I can remember," said Eleanor Roosevelt. "Why?"

Almost indiscriminately, with complete good will and inexhaustible curiosity, Eleanor Roosevelt looked at every facet of English life. No one was any longer the least bit surprised where she turned up. In the tiny Kentish village of Barham, the proud members of the pig war club informed her that their chubbiest, pinkest piglet was named Franklin. Holding Franklin, who is being fattened even more for a Christmas raffle, Mrs. Roosevelt said soberly: "I shall tell my husband that I've seen him."

She had to deny a rumor that she had stuffed paper in her shoes because the soles were thinning. But she was not the least bit disturbed by appearing every day in the same hat (cherry red, trimmed with red and green birds' wings) and the same coat (black cloth, with two blue fox furs trailing from the shoulders). She called it her "battle dress."

She also:

> Watched a mimic air-raid rescue in the rubble behind St. Paul's Cathedral, saw a movie of the 1940 blitz, inspected the bomb shelters in Dover's spacious caves.

> Had dinner with the Churchills, lunch at Claridge's with 13 women M.P.s presided over by Lady Astor, lunch with handsome Anthony Eden, visited Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, discussed clothes rationing with Queen Elizabeth, who is having trouble with fast-growing Princess Elizabeth's coupons.

> Explored the inside of a Flying Fortress ("I'm very fat for a pilot's seat--it wasn't made to accommodate an old lady well over 50").

> Had a glimpse of the bomb damage wrought on stately Canterbury Cathedral--the day before the Nazis bombed the historic town in the heaviest daylight raid on England in two years.

Pleased as punch with her trip, after ten days in Britain she had already concluded that more Americans should go there: "But they must be the right type . . . not the heads of industries, but the young up & coming men whose minds are still pliant and who can still learn."

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