Passport to Hell

NEW ZEALAND FICTION
General
Editor Bill Pearson

 

 

The photograph reproduced on the front cover and on these pages is an N.Z. Official Photograph printed in A. E. Byrne, Official History of the Otago Regiment, N.Z.E.F. in the Great War 191418, Dunedin 1921, and captioned ‘German Prisoners carrying out Wounded’.

ROBIN HYDE

Passport to Hell

The Story of James Douglas Stark, Bomber, Fifth Reinforcement, New Zealand Expeditionary Forces

Edited and Introduced by
D. I. B. SMITH

There is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in Men.’—WALT WHITMAN

AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction D. I. B. Smith

A Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

 

Passport to Hell

Author’s Note

Introduction to Starkie

1 Making of an Outlaw

2 Good-bye, Summer

3 Ring and Dummy

4 Cup for Youth

5 The Khaki Place

6 Conjurer and Pigeon

7 Dawn’s Angel

8 Bluecoat

9 Court Martial

10 The Noah’s Ark Country

11 Suicide Club

12 Brothers

13 Passport to Hell

14 Le Havre

15 Runaway’s Odyssey

16 Rum for His Corpse

17 Sunshine

18 London and Laurels

19 Last Reveille

 

Notes

Robin Hyde’s Published Volumes

Copyright

Dedicated on Starkie’s behalf to
The
Rev. George Moreton
On
mine, with gratitude,
to
Dr G. M. Tothill

Introduction

Passport to Hell is the story of 8/2142 Private J. D. Stark, Fifth Reinforcements, Otago Infantry Battalion N.Z.E.F., his youth in New Zealand and his experiences in the Great War of 1914–18. He returned to New Zealand disabled and without skills and like many soldiers found enormous difficulty in adjusting to civilian life. His drift into marriage, prison, violence, and occasional labour is told in another of Robin Hyde’s books Nor the Years Condemn.1 He survived the outbreak of World War II, married—for the third time—a twenty-three-year-old, Peggy Christina Linton, and suffered the ironic indignity for one of his former daring, of receiving two anonymous white feathers (Otago Daily Times, 10 January 1940). He died in Auckland on 22 February 1942, of bilateral broncho-pneumonia with toxic myocarditis, betrayed finally by his wounded lungs. He was buried in the soldiers’ section of Waikumete Cemetery by his friend the Reverend George Moreton, to whom he had asked Robin Hyde to dedicate Passport to Hell.

Hyde first heard of Stark through her investigative journalism on prisons for the New Zealand Observer. She joined the Observer in 1931 just after it had doubled its size, increased its price and aggressively sought more readers, believing that ‘there is a place in Auckland and the provincial district for an informative, illustrated, topical weekly, presenting not so much the ordinary news of the week as the news behind the news and comments thereon’.2 Or as Hyde put it in a letter to J. H. E. Schroder: ‘We are trying more or less, to steal “Truth’s” thunder without their unpleasantness: that is, to write bold & free as other papers mayn’t, but certainly not to haunt divorce courts & put harassed housemaids in the headlines.’ Following up this policy she ‘interviewed several convicts & wrote a pungent article about Mount Eden Gaol’.3 (N.Z. Observer, 9 March 1931: ‘A Convict’s Life in Mount Eden: Unpalatable Truths about Auckland’s Prison Fortress’.) Details from this article were to find their way into Passport to Hell4 but as far as I know she did not hear about Stark at this point. It is interesting however to find how convincing she was in writing of prison conditions for in the same letter to Schroder she observes, ‘And here was a compliment: the prison chaplain told me that the authorities spent hours hunting through the files for a convict named Robin Hyde!’ When, over a year later, she came to write an article on the chaplain, George Moreton, he drew her attention to a figure immediately recognizable as ‘Starkie’. Moreton had shown her letters from former prisoners requesting help:

There is one from a gentleman whom we will call Sammy—which isn’t his name. During the war, this man saved the Hon. Downie Stewart’s life, pulling him out of a bombed dug-out. He was absolutely fearless, and his chest is literally tattooed with bullet wounds. In Wellington he was once concerned in an assault cause, and got the worst of it. Mr Downie Stewart sent him to a private hospital and paid for a bottle of brandy—but this unfortunately was left beside the patient’s bed. Sammy revived somewhat—and when the doctor came in, he found a distinctly tipsy patient, in a cheerful frame of mind. This man sends occasional telegrams to plenipotentiaries in Wellington. ‘Dear Gordon, About ten wolves at the door, waiting your O.K.