for job’, may be regarded as a new one on the Hon. J. G. Coates. Mr Moreton is blithely addressed as ‘Young fellow me lad’, or ‘Dear George’. Yet this man, married now and passionately devoted to his wife and children, keeps his little home spotlessly clean, and hopes one day to pay back the ‘one tin jam, 2 lbs butter, one tin baking powder’ for which he now has to ask the D.P.A. [*]5

It was not until February 1935 that Hyde returned to Starkie, this time to interview him for a book.6 That she may have kept him in mind over those years is indicated in an undated letter to Schroder in which she describes her hopes for the book and continues: ‘It was a queer true terrible story—the story of a living man … that simmered until written.’7 Mid-way through March she was sufficiently confident of completing the work that she made over a half share in the royalties to Stark which he promptly assigned toward a furniture debt: being the proceeds ‘from the sale of a book now being written by Miss Iris Wilkinson concerning episodes of my life as a soldier in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force’.8 On 27 March she notified Schroder of her determination: ‘Am likewise going to complete a very queer sort of writing job which I’ve undertaken and which may be either a book or a nightmare when I’ve finished. It will take me about three months to finish the job I am doing.’9 However, within a month she announced triumphantly to Schroder:

The book that might have been a nightmare is finished. It is a nightmare, but I think it is a book—Harder, barer and more confident—It’s the story of a soldier—he exists and I know him very well. His queer racial heritage—he is half Red Indian, half Spaniard—has taken him into desperate places: prisons, battles, affairs. With it all he’s something of a visionary and —in physical courage—unquestionably heroic—I wrote the book because I had to write it when I heard his story, and because it’s an illustration of Walt Whitman’s line—‘There is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in man.’10

As George Moreton remembered it, he had initiated the writing of Passport to Hell sometime in the winter of 1935:

It must have been somewhere about that time that one morning, a slight woman with an interesting face and a lame leg swung into my office on a walking stick. Her name was Iris Wilkinson although, perhaps, she was better known to most people under her pen name ‘Robin Hyde’. She was inconspicuous enough until she began to talk and then you instantly realized that the person sitting before you was not ordinary; the acuminated intelligence behind the sensitive face made you feel like a ponderous galleon awkwardly trying to avoid the lightning shot of a nimble frigate. I forget most of what we talked about that morning but I do know towards the end of our conversation I asked her if she would like a good story: her smile was tolerant. ‘I should very much,’ she replied, ‘I must confess a weakness for good stories.’

I leaned over and drew a package from my desk and handed it to her—it was the diary of James Douglas Stark, bomber in the Fifth Regiment, N.Z.E.F., during the Great War. I can recall the excited pursing of Iris Wilkinson’s lips as she turned the pages of the document and the way she laughingly waved her stick as she left my office. And that was really the genesis of Passport to Hell, a book which a well-known English paper described as ‘… wild and strange as anything any warbook writer has remembered or imagined’.11

It is highly unlikely that Starkie kept a diary. Soldiers were officially forbidden to do so,12 and he certainly did not have the temperament to which diary keeping is natural. But he recognized the sensational nature of his experience and hoped to make something of it. It is also probable that like other men who had performed brave acts and not been officially noticed, he wished to be recognized. As Ernest Atkins complained: ‘I was recommended for a medal five times. The grievance about it all exists in my mind to this day and is the main reason for writing.’13 In any case in 1926 Starkie was writing to Downie Stewart about his ‘book’: ‘Downie let me know about that book of mine soon as you can because if it is jake I will finish it.’14 Eight months later he mentions a book, again in a letter to Downie Stewart, on this occasion writing from prison: ‘I have been on a book and I am just arriving in Armentiers in the Bombers with you.’15 It is impossible to tell if this work was in the package which George Moreton handed to Robin Hyde, but she certainly possessed a very sketchy and overwritten account of a number of Stark’s adventures. It is contained in a black exercise book, part of Derek Challis’s collection of his mother’s papers, and written in a hand quite unlike that of Robin Hyde or of Stark. Inside the left front cover is an inscription in Stark’s writing: ‘C. Murphy, No 1 p.1–89 inclusive 7/9/29’. The writer is clearly a novice, for he notes down ‘Useful Books’: ‘The Commercial Side of Literature’, ‘Journalism for profit’, and ‘How to write a short story’, and there are rough drafts of different material interspersed with vocabulary lists. I assume that Stark met him in prison and hoped that he would ‘ghost-write’ his experiences. Murphy on the other hand, hoped to break into print with Stark’s story, and get out of prison. This emerges from the draft of a letter from Murphy to Stark on folio 30 of the exercise book:

Since writing this book of yours I have decided to continue on in the business. I have always had a flair for writing and wish to utilize the time here in something of use to me when I leave.