LIFE AMONG LEPERS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22845, 28 September 1937, Page 10

LIFE AMONG LEPERS

HUSBAND'S OCCUPATION WIFE REFUSES TO SHARE LONDON. Sept. 20 If a man accepts a position as head of a leper colony, should he expect his wife to share his life there or is she justified in refusing to join him? English magistrates held that she was entitled to refuse; those at the place where the husband works say she was unreasonable.

In May lihoda Southern, aged 29, of Blackpool, obtained a maintenance order for £1 a week against her husband, Robert Southern, aged 29, superintendent of a leper island in the Straits Settlements. He offered her a luxurious bungalow, a car and a motorlaunch.

The Penang magistrates have refused to enforce the order on the ground that the wife is unreasonable in declining to go to Penang and see the conditions.

"I cannot go to him there," Mrs. Southern told the Daily Mail. My husband never offered to provide me with a home outside tho settlement. Would you cut yourself off from the world and live among 1000 lepers for the rest of your life? I would go anywhere in tho world with him except where he is now.

"A year ago he cabled, saying that he had his present job. I wrote, begging him not to accept it, but it was too late. Ho said his work would last 10 years, and he would have eight months' leave at the end of three years. If he contracts tho disease, he will have to stay there the rest of his life. "Is there a woman in England who would sacrifice her chances of happiness and a normal life to such a terrible end?"

The authoress Elinor Glyn, in Riving her answer to the question, said today: "No peril in the world should keep a woman from the side of the man slio loves."