IN THE SWIM FOR SUMMER

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 34, 19 November 1938, Page 4

IN THE SWIM FOR SUMMER

plantain leaves. • - ■* rv “We lived in the native bamhoo huts, raised high on stilts, and very clean. “Our porters, hired in Singapore, were paid the equivalent of £2 a month. When we reached the wilds money meant nothing. » “Salt—nails—cigarettes! “Each day we gave the natives their rations. They loved to eat salt by the handful, to smoke our cigarettes, and they thought that pounding nails into

logs was a diverting new game. “Though they are primitives, wearing only a loin cloth, they are really quite clean, and they are very docile. When the interpreter ordered them to beat the wild animals into the bush, in order that,

we could get our long-lens camera ‘shots,’ they obeyed, but shook their heads in wonderment, considering it just another

‘crazy white man’s idea.’ “No, they' had never seen a motion picture, and we were advised not to show them a film, as it might, excite them. “Entertainment?” Colin shrugged. “Oh, we took books along, we read and we slept a . lot. I also made 16-millimetre camera films. > “At one spot we were just 50 miles from the equator. Though the average heat is only about 100, the \humidity makes it a real discomfort. We could work only from 7 to 11 in the morning, when the sky would get patchy with clouds, obscuring the light. Then came the rains! Monotonous sheets of drizzle, an oppressive blanket. “The barbaric beat on tom-toms, the pungent aromas from the forests, and the buzzing insects at first, kept us awake at night. Soon, however, all that became a soothing lullaby.” Elliott and Tapley discovered Suratna Asmara, a native of Sawah Lorento, Java. She had danced in Singapore, and in India she had given a command performance before the Maharajah of Patiala. The studio cabled permission to bring her to Hollywood. But when her family of 40 relatives insisted upon accompanying her to “the wicked place” the deal v/as jinxed. In fact, in the Hollywood editing and revision her scenes were eliminated. So all that the dusky damsel has left of her movie-debut is an idyllic memory. Much has been speculated and written about the disappearance of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, in November, 1935, when the titled aviator was lost on an England-to-Australia flight. Several expeditions have attempted to find his plane’s wreckage. A wheel and part of undercarriage, discovered off Aye Island, have been identified by the Lockheed Company as remnants of his ship, Lady Southern Cross.

Elliott and Tapley explain his disappearance: “The nativ-s believe that there is a wide area in the Malay Archipelago where there’s a ‘down drift,’ and there ‘strangers from the sky’ are sucked down. That superstition is a folklore legend. We tried to find a trace of him, but all we could gather was a report that natives in a remote village had seen a brief glimpse of his plane, ’The big bird in the sky.’ ” No women accompanied the heroes from Hollywood. Quoting Elliott: “The jungle is no place for a woman. Take a woman on an expedition into the wilds and you borrow trouble. I did twice. I never will again. Men can stand the canned food, the heat, the smell of the savages, all of the discomforts. But women get the heebiejeebies, particularly at night when the insects’ drone and the babel of jungle sounds rasp their nerves ragged.” < The story of “Booloo”—the correct spelling is “Bulu,” meaning, literally, “fur and feathers”—concerns the efforts of a young English writer to prove the statement made by his father, an explorer, as to the existence of the white

tiger. The museum questions the book that the young man has written, recording his late father’s exploits. The hero invades the Malayan jungles, captures a white tiger, vindicates his father’s name, gets his papa’s plaque restored to its niche of honour in the Geographic Museum. In the fade-out he weds the English girl with whom he has maintained contact via short-wave" radio, relayed from the British outpost stations. “The white tiger is not a myth,” Tapley assured me!, “though it is very rare. It is found in the Saiki country, where the natives regard it as sort of holy-cow, and, with their petty but poisonous blowdarts, pop hunters who attempt to find it.” Tapley—lean, bronzed, muscular, a sight to delight feminine eyes accustomed to Hollywood’s collar-ad heroes—was bom in Dunedin, New Zealand, and educated at Christ’s College. His father, while Mayor of Dunedin, and owner of a big shipping business, was decorated by the King for aid given to the first Byrd South Polar expedition. Colin became interested in amateur theatricals and played in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. A job as salesman for a grocery firm was so monotonous that he went to England and enilisted in the Royal Air Force. Invalided in 1930 when a wing fell from his plane, he wanted to return home. Unwilling to cable his father for financial help, he shipped as a deck hand. Learning by radio that his father was on a committee meeting the ship, he persuaded the captain to let him' wear respectable clothes and stand at the rail with the passengers. Sheep farming occupied him for a time. When that bored him he played in amateur theatricals over New Zealand.

Novel Sink-Spray. A spray that can bo attached to the water-tap over the kitchen sink is a useful aid when washing up for the rinsing of china. There is a neat one that can be fixed tc any tap and is combined with a filter and an anti-splash device that lets the water flow without splashing. A small lever can be pushed into two positions. In the first, the filtered water runs through in the usual way, and in the second, the water comes through in a fine spray. Wooden Tableware. Wooden tableware which has been gaining favour recently has two new forms in a fruit dish, in which wood is combined with metal, and in a cheeseboard that consists of a walnut base with a circular space hollowed out for the cheese and a glass dome to fit over the top. The fruit dish is of metal with a block of wood going right through the centre to make a foot to support the dish. Above half-a-dozen woodenhandied fruit knives are held in slots at the top of the back<

Table Lighting-. ; Two ways of bringing light to beautify . table centres are new ones. The first is a mixed bouquet of glass flowers set in a cream-coloured bowl containing a light that shines through the glass flowers and leaves, causing them to sparkle. .The second way is by the use of a ! double bowl on , a stand. An inner b.owl is used for real flowers while the light comes from an outer ring to shed a j glow on to the flowers. 1

Fruit in Vases» . . j Fruit plays almost as big: a part in table decoration as do flowers, and now they appear not only on the table, but as a general decoration of the room. The. fruit that goes into wall vases, or in jars on a side table is not, however, ! the real article. Artificial fruit, smaller! than life-size, but wonderfully realistic in colour and texture, fashionable ! change from flowers. 1