RIP VAN WINKLE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22391, 12 October 1934, Page 17

RIP VAN WINKLE

BACK FROM THE JUNGLES FIRST KISS FOR TWENTY YEARS LONDON LIFE ONCE MORE » Frederick Merfield, possibly the most famous “White Hunter” Africa has ever known, recently returned to England after 25 years spent in the jungles and forests of the French Cameroons, He is a modern Rip Van Winkle. For a quarter of a century he has been almost completely cut off from civilisation. Wireless, the aeroplane, motor buses, beach pyjamas, express trains and short skirts have been as legendary to him until now as the dragons of fairy tale. Here is the new world through his eyes:— “It is no joke being a modern Rip Van Winkle, Every now and then I take a- look at a large bruise the size of a saucer on my leg. It is a good bruise because it has lasted me for four months, and to me it’s rather valuable. 1 got in an argument with a gorilla. “I had been tracking through tho jungle a wonderful buffalo, and my bearers passed on to me a warning that gorilla were coming. Seeing that we were beating cautiously through a low tunnel in the undergrowth just high and wide enough to let a man pass, there was nothing to do but to let the gorilla come on, TESTING THE THEORY, “ Now the natives in the Cameroons have the fixed belief that if a man stands perfectly still and faces up to these huge beasts, standing just under six feet and as wide as a door, he will bo perfectly safe. Several white men I’ve met apparently believe it too, the idea being that the gorilla recognises instinctively a superior being and a higher intelligence. He will come up and roar, beat his chest and stamp his / feet, but leave it at that. “ Whether I liked it or not, I had no alternative hut to give the theory a trial. The gorilla came on. There was hardly room to swing a cat where I was standing, let alone flourish a rifle, so that I dropped on to my knees to get a proper shot at the thing. “ What happened I do not know. I suddenly found myself in the incredibly powerful grasp of the roaring ape. He was bent on crushing me to death. Somehow my gun went off. The bullet must have whizzed past the gorilla’s ear, or, at any rate, given him such a fright that lie let me go and did a bolt. That is how I got the bruise, and I am grateful in a way to that ape because he has provided me with my one item of small talk. “ That is the worst of being away from civilisation —vou come back with no small talk fit for polite society. I do not know what'to talk to people about, and that bruise reminds me of a topic of conversation that tides me over awkward moments. , WATCHING THE GIRLS GO BY. “ Everything is so commonplace to you, but to me, the modern Rip Van Winkle, walking about London, the place is full of marvels. Incredible places these kinemas. Of course, I had heard about them and seen the advertisements in the newspapers sent out from Home, but these glittering palaces of shining steel fronts —chromium plate, is it?—and extraordinary glittering, fiery letters. Neon signs? Never heard , of them. “ I have been to the pictures twice. First one was a romance, fellow kissing a girl all over tho screen. It made me feel ill because—well, hang it, would you kiss your girl in public? Besides, t am not interested in romance, but I eould not help being fascinated at the thing. It was the realism that upset me. I suppose. “ I wanted action —gangsters were more in my line. They get a move on and do things. It was a thrill to see the way those fellows dashed about the place firing off machine-guns. Anyone fan get the job done with a machinegun, but I would like to sec how they got on with a rifle in the jungle. “To my eyes there’s nothing more fascinating than standing at a street corner and watching the girls go by. None of them looks hard up. The factory girl or workroom hand seems to have gone for ever. It seems hard to believe that all these girls work in offices. There was none of that when I worked in an underground cellar in St. Paul’s Churchyard in a wholesale draper’s. GETTING ACROSS TRAFALGAR SQUARE. “ Another thing that came as an awful shock was to see those great aeroplane things sailing over London during the air exercises. Lindbergh flying the Atlantic was a complete fairy tale to me. I had only a vague idea what an aeroplane was like, for the only thing remotely like it was that queer affair I saw Colonel Cody try to fly at Alexandra Palace. But the row they make. How can any man possibly live in them with that terrible racket going on? What keeps them up is as obscure to me as juju magic. “The same Providence that kept me safe when charged by elephants or poisoned by snakes piloted me safely across Trafalgar Square. These gigantic buses, controlled goodness knows how, and loaded with people calmly reading their papers or looking serenely out of the window as they whizzed within an inch of the kerb looked to me infinitely more dangerous than a charging rhino. After all, you cau dodge a rhino. “Last Christmas I made a journey of over 100 miles from Mayoss to Batouri to hear a wireless set in the post office there. There was nothing to be board but an appalling rattling and crackling. The man working it assumed me that he could get music and occasionally the chiming of Big Ben. The music part could easily be faked with a gramophone—but Big Ben, no, thank you. NO INTEREST IN POLITICS. “I had to come back to England to hear the wireless at all, and it was an eerie business. But I am getting into the way of it. I keep my mouth from gaping open when something fresh turns up. I try not to look too interested when a policeman pulls up motorists struggling with their gears and says: * What do you think you’re doing?’ Those policemen look supermen to me. “With all those things going on it is hard to fit oneself in. _ Somehow I can’t get interested in politics. When I buy a newspaper and see some calamity reported, I look at it and think, ‘ Ah, well, that’s all over by now.’ It is difficult to get out of tho way of thinking that this thing has happened two months ago.” After this interview Mr Merfield wrote to the Sunday Graphic giving his strangest experience of all. He said: “Yesterday I kissed a girl for the first time for 20 years.”