Robert Neville, new chief of TIME'S Rome Bureau, was in the U.S. recently on a stopover from his previous assignment in Hong Kong. At lunch one day, the conversation got around to a favorite topic of all foreign correspondents: the housing and moving problems overseas.

Said Neville: "Almost everywhere you go, there's an unpredictable kind of water shortage, and you have to adjust your living to it. In Hong Kong the water came on for five hours a day, some in the morning, some at noon, a little more at night. In New Delhi, the government has requisitioned practically all housing, and what's left doesn't fit the Western idea of home. When James Burke got there, he rented a house way out in Old Delhi and had to put in his own bathroom." Inflation has boosted rents almost everywhere, Neville said, but he remembered one instance when inflation worked out to his advantage. He had rented a house in Buenos Aires for seven months for 1,600 pesos a month. At the start of the lease period, that was about $275. But at the end of the seven months, it amounted to only $100.

Since that conversation, I have asked several other correspondents about their moving and housing problems. All of them had something to add to Neville's observations. London Correspondent Gene Farmer reported an unusual kind of trouble with electrical appliances. There are about 165 different kinds of wall sockets in use in the London area, he said. Before they bought a new plug for their sewing machine, Mrs. Farmer had to decide which room to put it in. Now, if that room is cold, he said, "she either freezes or doesn't sew, because the plug won't fit into any other socket."

The Farmers live in an old Georgian house, rich in atmosphere but unsteadied by the effects of bombs that landed nearby during the war. One night a London bobby called at the front door with an expression of injured dignity. It seems that a piece of the roof had fallen, missing his head by a scant few feet. Said he: "Madam, your house is a menace."

Only one correspondent reported a buyer's market in housing. Robert Lubar, arriving in Mexico City, was overjoyed to find an abundance of houses. Said he: "Within two weeks I was settled in a dwelling that would look good anywhere. That was the first time since I became a correspondent that I'd had such good luck." But Lubar has not always been so lucky. In Bombay in 1949, he managed to rent a comfortable apartment from a Moslem lady who had moved to England. Lubar soon began to receive fat, special-delivery letters from her, in which she complained about her domestic troubles. As the troubles mounted, the letters got thicker. Lubar read and answered them patiently, fearful that any break in the correspondence might put an end to his tenancy. Apparently this conduct satisfied the landlady. Lubar wasn't put out on the sunbaked street.

When he was in Germany, Lubar was able to rent an ancient mansion on the Rhine, overlooking both the river and the four tracks of the main rail line under his bedroom window. The chief disadvantage was the lack of a private entrance. The house was quiet when the lease had been signed, and Lubar assumed that only the landlord and his wife lived on the top floor. But when he moved in, the house suddenly teemed with the landlord's six children, running up & down the stairs and through the apartment vestibule. Because of the bleakness of the housing situation, he decided to suffer such inconveniences in Spartan silence.

Housing problems in Tokyo are probably as bad as they are anywhere. When Bureau Secretary Harriet Wong was transferred from Hong Kong, she looked for a house for months, was unable to find one until Advertising Salesman Harold Hirata built an extra house on his land and rented it to her. Correspondent Dwight Martin rented his extra bedroom to Colin MacCulloch, Pacific circulation manager. Martin jokingly told the cook that MacCulloch was to have only two eggs for breakfast. Going beyond the call of duty, the cook initiated a series of regular reports on what and how much MacCulloch ate every day, "indicating with appropriate smiles and glances when he's overdoing it." Martin is looking forward with thinly disguised relish to the day that MacCulloch asks for three eggs. The cook, Martin explains, is a judo expert, fourth class.

Cordially yours,

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