TYPISTE IN JUNGLE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22391, 11 April 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

TYPISTE IN JUNGLE

BRAVE LONDON GIRL HUNTER'S YOUNG " BRIDE FAMILY BATH A FOREST POOL Typing in an office all day, fireside and occasional cinema evenings, tennis at the week-ends—that was Hilda Baker's life in a London suburb until she met Fred Merfield. Mr. Merfield was a hunter in the West African jungle. For twenty years he hunted big game, sending live animals, stuffed ones, skeletons and other specimens to the world's museums, zoos and private collections. He had not seen England in all that time. Eighteen months ago he went home on six months'" leave and met Hilda Baker. Now Fred and Hilda Merfield, their three-month-old baby and a tame gorilla, are living happily in a mud hut in a jungle clearing at Yaounde, the French Cameroons, West Africa.

At intervals they go on 400-mile or so trejis into country where no white woman has been before. Mrs. Merfield, ex-London typiste, takes a lamp whenever she crosses from the bungalow to the kitchen at night so that she can avoid snakes. Her native servant examines her feet every night and removes jiggers—the creatures which eat their way into the body and lay their eggs there.

She has her morning bath by diving from a log thrown across a forest pool. Her sole visitors are native women clad only in leaves, who bring their pains and wounds to her to be cured, and the native chief, who brings his deck chair to listen by the hour to Command performances of "the King of England's voice." This is the gramophone. All the natives are enraptured with the gramophone. "Fred told them it was the King of England singing on the gramophone," Mrs. Merfield stated in a letter to her mother, "and they said, 'He be good.' It is useless saying it is Peter Dawson or some one like that, as they would not understand."

This girl, who knew nothing of life beyond the prim politeness of a London suburb, the homely affections of family life and the easy-going friendliness of an office, has settled down as happily in the jungle as she would have done in Streatham.