I FIRST heard of Stark when a very glum welfare worker—a friend of mine—informed me that he had declared, that unless he could lawfully come by a pair of trousers he was prepared to steal them. This raised rather a pretty little point of law—whether it were best for Starkie to help himself to the main form of covering prescribed by society, and almost inevitably—he being fatally conspicuous in size and colour—be picked up by the police; or to go ahead, minus trousers or in trousers no longer fitted for the gaze of eyes polite, and thus eventually be arrested for the sort of offence which makes thoughtful parents gently remove the newspapers from the hands of growing girls. ‘What’s a man without his breeches?’
However Starkie resolved this affair with his conscience he was, when I first saw him at his little house in Grey’s Avenue, wearing trousers. He had also an elderly and sleeveless black shirt, which made him look like a Fascist general—but a finer figure than most of them. He had no socks, no fingers on the left hand—the thumb of which was brilliantly tattooed with the legend, ‘Here’s the Orphan’—and an unconquerable smile. When something happened to amuse Starkie—and a good many things amused him—his black eyes lit up and sparkled, his mouth cracked open to show as many magnificent white teeth as half a life-time of combats with N.C.O.s, military police, common or garden coppers, and other heretics—all of whom he described impartially as ‘The Villains’—had left him.
Apart from these marks of identification, Starkie had a little blue ring tattooed on his massive bronze chest. That was where the sniper’s bullet tore through his lungs; and his Colonel, the regret in his voice strongly tempered by relief, remarked: ‘Curtains, Starkie.’ On each shoulder are tattooed the handsome stars of captaincy. During the War, Starkie became by degrees very tired of the manner in which his laurels wilted before the blasts of hot air emanating from those holes where gentlemen with long memories sat and brooded over crime-sheets. One honour at least, he decided, should be his beyond recall. So he spent an hour with a Maori friend, and came out pale but triumphant—the one and only tattooed captain in the whole army.
Grey’s Avenue was built in Auckland City’s first slow edging towards the beautiful and true. It was then known as Grey Street; and despite the fact that it was christened for the most distinguished gentleman who ever acted as Governor over the unruly Benjamin of British colonies, it was characterized by an invincible lust for the disreputable. The three-storeyed red-and-white bawdy-houses of Upper Queen Street extended into Grey Street, and mingled happily with Chinese grocery-shops, masonic clubs, and pakapoo saloons, all known to the city’s then very few moral uplifters as ‘Chinese Dens’. Needless to say, the little Celestials were by far the most orderly of the street’s tenants. But Grey Street’s reputation was well-founded.
There was really no reason why it should not have been rather a beautiful byway. So near the city that the Town Hall’s posterior is thrust into its lower half, it is afflicted by neither street cars nor buses, and slopes upwards, fine and straight, garnished with a double row of half-hearted English trees whose falling leaves, in their sallow little pools, add to the general shiftlessness. But nothing could be done about it. Grey Street remained the sort of place where husbands with impunity and gusto thrash their wives—and vice versa—where policemen with a great deal of sound and fury, signifying probable fines of from £50 to £100 to be inflicted later in the police courts, smash in the steel doors of opium dens, and where it is possible—though very remotely—to win £60 by marking your ten characters correctly on a green sixpenny pakapoo ticket.
The name of the street was changed to Grey’s Avenue, apparently in a wild hope that the more distinguished nomenclature might induce in the savage breasts of the inhabitants some dim longing after respectability. Nothing much happened. The Salvation Army took up its head-quarters on one side of the street, setting down a solid white ferro-concrete chunk of gospel truth which looked like a market-woman among whores. Adjoining this depressing building there is now a free kindergarten and a park—rather a nice little park, where the children slither down mighty chutes and wear out cotton drawers bouncing about on see-saws. But the other side of the street—the side where you will find, near the top, Starkie’s little house—remains given over to the shiftless pools of dead leaves, to Chinese cafés so grimy that even University students won’t eat in them, to shops that appear to be empty until after nightfall.
These empty shops of Grey’s Avenue are rather intriguing. In the more prosperous days of my childhood a better pretence was kept up. They appeared as pastrycooks, confectioners, or grocers; but the curious thing was that nobody ever went in to buy pastry, confectionery, or groceries at these particular shops. There were, of course, respectable provision merchants a-plenty in the street. We were strictly forbidden to approach the street at all, and, technically, at least, remained in complete ignorance as to the existence of its masquerading shops. None the less, we were devoured by a frightful curiosity about them; and I remember one day when a party of us, all between the ages of seven and ten, invaded the confectioner’s. Timidly we whispered a request for chocolates, there being in the window several dusty boxes.
The lady with the enormous white face and the stupendous bosom encased in bright pink wool leaned right over the counter, showing three teeth in a snarl.
‘Yer little devils, gwan out o’ this…. Yer know bloody well them’s dummies!’
Since the War, however, professional immorality has suffered a sad decline; and the Chinese card-games, which offer the gambler that delightful something for nothing so sternly denied the lover, have taken over practically all the old haunts. By day the empty shops are shuttered and dirty. Passing by in a wet blue dusk on my way to Starkie’s house, I observed that the doors of the empty shops rustled and rattled, that men slid in and out, mysterious as rats, that within, faint and warm light glittered from inner doors.
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