STRANGE WAYS OF LIFE

Evening Star, Issue 22459, 2 October 1936, Page 7

STRANGE WAYS OF LIFE

THOSE WHO BREAK CUSTOM'S TRAMMELS We all spend our lives so xhucli in the same way that when anyone chooses to break with the trammels of custom, he is sure of at least passing fame (writes W. F. Martin, in the ‘ Daily Express ’). It is not surprising, therefore, that from distant Kobe, in Japan, the news travelled recently to this country of a certain Mr N. H. N. Mody, who arrived at the Oriental Hotel in that city 15 years ago and has never left his hotel bedroom since. Solitary in the midst of men, he seems to find companionship in the hundreds of clocks and watches that tick out the hours for him in every corner of the room. It is a strange mode of life, but certainly not stranger than that which made famous the late Bayard Brown, the American financier. For 36 years he chose to live in his palatial steam yacht Valfreya, which, although fully-; manned and ready with a head of steam to put to sea at any moment, never ventured forth from the day in 1889 that she dropped anchor at Brightlingsea. 1 Indeed, it is doubtful if she would ever' have moved from her original anchorage, but during the war the Admiralty insisted, and the Valfreya went into dry dock at Wivenhoe. There she remained with a curl of smoke at her funnel and the wooden struts holding her blackening with age until Brown died in 1926. The sea is often the refuge of men who find life ashore with their fellowmen irksome. The name of the Frenchman Alain Gerbault remains with u§ not as the tennis star nor the intrepid war-time pilot, but as the man who sailed round the world alone in the little 10-ton Fire Crest. Books were his only companions and writing them his diversion. Since his memorable first tour, which started in 1924, he has voyaged back to the Pacific islands again, and now seems to have settled—if one can use such a word in reference to so solitary a wanderer—in Tahiti. It is doubtless merely a centre from which he can cruise in that paradise of South Sea islands whose lonelineess he loves so much better than our western world. Another man who finds at sea just those attractions which Gerbault sought to escape by going to sea is Major H. E. Long, formerly of the 4th Hussars. In August of last year he booked three consecutive passages in the P. and 0. liner Barrabool, and finally completed four passages to and from Australia before the vessel was sold to be broken up last May. Now he has transferred his floating homo to the Mongolia, belonging to the same company and journeying on the same route. His cabin has some of his own furniture in it, and his own pictures decorate the walls. He has no other home and desires none, and intends to keep travelling back and forth in the Mongolia as Jong as he can. “ I never weary of the sea and I am always well in a ship,” is Major Long’s reason for his unusual mode of life. Much the same reason tempted a 75-year-old Danish woman. Miss Cecile Lutken, last June to book a passage in a cargo ship “ for the duration of the voyage ” —which is expected to be two years. Since she first chose the sea, seven years ago, she has made voyages to India, China, and Japan, and, like Major Long, is convinced there is no finer life. I have failed to discover anyone who deliberately chose the burning heart of a desert as a place to spend his days, but the well-known American illustrator Rockwell Kent, as his recent book shows, was well pleased with life among the Eskimos in the frozen wastes of Greenland. Perhaps even more austere has been the life of the Berkshire youth who has grown grizzled and grey in the recesses of Patagonia, where glacier ice caps the mountains and high winds sweep all trees from their barren slopes.

There the man now known as “ El Jimmy ” herds his flocks and farms his

ranch many days’ journey from th« nearest centre of civilisation. His loneliness is shared by his Patagonian wife and five children, and it seems likely that “ El Jimmy ’ will die contented in what the world considers to be one of the most inhospitable of inhabited lands. There is a touch of the hermit about all these people who shun the ordinary ways of men, but they have an originality and imagination which distinguish them emphatically from their fellows.