The patrons of the gambling-schools leave little sentry groups on the pavement. These are part white—unshaven—and part Chinese—very discursive, in that clicking, unknown tongue. The white men look much the less attractive; but, on the other hand, there is such a derisive note in those rattling Chinese discourses. I always feel that they are mocking the gait of the passer-by, declaring in their own speech that she is bandy—or, alternatively, knock-kneed. Not that either is the regrettable truth.

A few of the shops live open to daylight and lamplight. One displays vile-looking rowelled spurs—God knows where they are used…. A Chinese one is as charming as an early book of Ronald Fraser’s with its queer, thick porcelain spoons, its ginger-jars, its tins of water-lily shoots. A little Chinese lady lives here, much prettier than the one with whom you used to be in love when you first sipped green tea from the frail cup with the flower-faces and the absurd, dignified robes. Pass by the ‘Carpenter’s Arms’, which is conveniently wide-windowed so that you can observe whether your husband happens to be one of the drowning flies in the one-and-sixpenny bottles of amber in the bar. Then come a few vacant sections, where mangy stray cats live out their mysterious lives of hunger, sorrow, and—as Mr Lionel Britton puts it—love. The residential area begins—little dingy houses squeezing and shouldering together, eaves touching, verandahs joining, board-fences broken down for firewood between the patches of scrubby garden where nothing ever grows.

There might meet you at the gate of Starkie’s house a little girl with amber-yellow hair, very neatly combed, and the brightest of brown eyes in a face no darker than the Italian biscuit colour. This is Josie, Josephine, Flossie, or Flo, at three years old by way of being the beauty of the Stark family. Or the heir to the house of Stark, one year old and a rich cream-chocolate colour, may stagger out on his fat legs and regard you with such a sleepy smile that you will feel an astonishing desire to pick him up. His costume is like Joseph’s coat, of many colours, being composed of all the bright-coloured scraps that have ever come into the house.

Within, a mellow voice says reproachfully, ‘Hey, Banty! Banty!’ The four little bantam hens, a rich auburn colour and with feathery trousers down their legs, quarrel bitterly for a place on Starkie’s shoulders. The outlaw sits at the table, brooding over a cup of tea. He has washed the children’s clothing, scrubbed the floor, induced the baby to take a nap, and once again successfully beguiled the formidable rent man—a wisp of a youth whom I privately believe to be terrified of the dusky enormous Starkie—into waiting one more week. But life is still complicated. The City Council is down on him for keeping fowls in a city area, and can’t or won’t believe that the four red bantams are Starkie’s brothers. The matter should be clear enough to any reasonable authority, since indirectly those bantams were the cause of one of Starkie’s prison sentences. Being badly in want of manna, he stole and devoured the chickens of a neighbour. The magistrate wanted to know why he didn’t eat his own fowls, and on being told that Starkie loved the bantams, took umbrage and refused the option of a fine. ‘Hey, Banty…. Banty…. Hey, Flo, what’ll you do if they come and take Banty away?’

This is the house where the Maori girl, Ritahia, who was respectably baptized by the Bishop of Auckland what time her future husband was arguing with snipers on Gallipoli, took down her guitar and played her little tune for the four-and-twenty members of her tribe who had quartered themselves on her, off and on, ever since her marriage to Starkie—just five minutes before he went into the next room, to find her quiet and smiling, her lips blue with the coming of a swift death. He still has Ritahia’s thousand blue iris bulbs, which she brought with much pride from the country, but which refused to grow in Grey’s Avenue.

This is the house which opens its doors at times, by night and by day, to curious and unexpected guests. There is an infernal creaking downstairs. This means that a man and a brother, having spent his all at the ‘Carpenter’s Arms’, has silently stolen into Starkie’s cellar and, draping ancient coal-sacks around him, prepared to sleep it off. Or in the evening a head pops round the back door, and a one-armed man solemnly proffers a large and gleaming mackerel, caught off the edge of the Auckland wharves. ‘Thought you could use it for the kids, Starkie.’ And he is gone again.

There is a queer link—often unseen; never, I think, unreal—between men whose closest-written chapters of life centred round about Egypt, Gallipoli, Armentières, the Somme, Ypres. Mixing with the crowd who have not shared their experience, they are dumb dogs enough.