1‘This man is the biggest, laziest, rottenest, most troublesome—
And in the trenches he’s one of the best soldiers I ever had.’

Passport to Hell is the story of James Douglas Stark—Starkie—
and his war. Born in Southland and finding himself in early
trouble with the law, the young Starkie tricked his way into adraft in 1914 by means of a subterfuge involving whisky andtea. In his subsequent chequered career in Egypt, Gallipoli,
Armentières, the Somme, Ypres, he showed himself ‘a soldier
and not a solider’, with a ‘contempt of danger and discipline alike’. Hyde took the raw horrors, respites and reversalsof Starkie’s experiences and composed a work of literaturemuch greater than a mere documentary of war. She portrays aman carousing in the brothels of Cairo and the estaminets of
Flanders; looting a dead man’s money-belt and filching beerfrom the Tommies; attempting to shoot a sergeant through alavatory door in a haze of absinthe, yet carrying his woundedcaptain back across No Man’s Land; a man recommended for
the V.C. and honoured for his bravery – but also subject to nine
courts martial.
Robin Hyde was one of New Zealand’s true literary trailblazers, and in this book she redefined the parameters of noveland memoir. In its psychological acuity and emotional depth,
Passport to Hell is one of the finest war books we have.
Published to mark the centenary of this quintessential New
Zealand war story, this newly reset edition includes Hyde’s final
authorized text from 1937 and an introduction and notes by
D. I. B. Smith.

Robin Hyde (1906–39) was a New Zealand journalist, novelist
and poet. She began her journalistic career at the Dominion,
aged sixteen years old, and in succeeding years worked for the
Christchurch Sun, the Wanganui Chronicle, and the New ZealandObserver. Over ten years of great turbulence in her personal
and professional life Robin Hyde wrote ten books of poetry
and prose, among them the autobiographical novel The Godwits
Fly, the two documentary novels featuring Starkie, Passport toHell and Nor the Years Condemn, and the travel book Dragon
Rampant. A biography of Hyde, The Book of Iris, written by her
friend Gloria Rawlinson and son Derek Challis, was publishedby Auckland University Press in 2002.

Contents
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
Bibliography

Introduction to Starkie

i first heard of stark when a very glum welfare worker – afriend of mine – informed me that he had declared, that unlesshe 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 upby the police; or to go ahead, minus trousers or in trousers nolonger fitted for the gaze of eyes polite, and thus eventually bearrested 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 hewas, 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 theleft hand – the thumb of which was brilliantly tattooed withthe 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 of5

whom he described impartially as ‘The Villains’ – had left him.
Apart from these marks of identification, Starkie had alittle 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 overcrime-sheets. One honour at least, he decided, should be his
beyond recall. So he spent an hour with a Maori friend, andcame 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-whitebawdy-houses of Upper Queen Street extended into GreyStreet, 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 tosay, the little Celestials were by far the most orderly of thestreet’s tenants. But Grey Street’s reputation was well-founded.
There was really no reason why it should not have beenrather 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 general6shiftlessness. But nothing could be done about it. Grey Street
remained the sort of place where husbands with impunity andgusto thrash their wives – and vice versa – where policemen witha 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 – thoughvery 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 ofgospel 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, toChinese 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 into 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.

7

4

Cup for Youthb e t w ee n b r i s co e ’ s c o rn e r

and the little fish-shop were
exactly seventeen lamp-posts. In the fish-shop, sitting on ahigh stool and swallowing down the sweet little rock oysters
from Stewart Island, he felt comparatively safe. But the slatternly girl who thrust the food across the marble-topped
counter stared at him, and turned aside to titter. His crumpledclothes. . . . He walked back to Briscoe’s Corner. Back to thefish-shop again, to stare in at the window, anxious that nobody
passing by should notice him. He stood there until the whitepool of the sunlight was gone from the streets, and instead,around each lamp-post, swam the cautious little aureoles oforange.
That night he spent four of his remaining eleven shillings on
a bed in a small hotel. He had no sleeping-kit, and crept naked
between grey-white sheets. In the morning, passing over thenecessity of breakfast for the heavier need of hoarding the money
he had left, he went back to Briscoe’s Corner. Although he had
been born in this town, a door seemed to have closed between
him and the intimacies of his childhood. He wasn’t going home.
Nobody whose face was familiar went past. The passers-by
looked harassed, and greatly intent upon their own business;even the mangy stray dogs loped swift and stealthy from one
butcher’s shop to the next.

8

But Starkie had one acquaintance in Invercargill who was
not likely to disown him – a collective acquaintance, with manyslight differences in face and build, but always with the samestolid stare, the same heavy hand on his shoulder, the same
heavy, jocose voice. This acquaintance came and stood besidehim midway through his second morning at Briscoe’s Corner.
The big paw dropped on his shoulder. The voice said, ‘Where
are you working now, Stark?’‘Looking for a job,’ he muttered, never looking at the big,bland face.
‘Don’t be funny, Stark.’ The grip on his shoulder tightened.
‘I’ll give you a job, my lad – two jobs. You can have a job at aha’penny a day blocking the swamps, or a job at a dollar a day
fighting for your King. What’s it to be?’Something inside the mind of the boy who could have twojobs disliked the idea of being run by the police. He had served
his time in tomb and mud-hole and irons. He twisted in thepoliceman’s grip.
‘I’ll give you a job,’ he shouted, ‘pulling yourself out of
this!’ Then he took to his heels. The policeman, taken by
surprise, floundered on his back in the middle of Briscoe’s
window-display, splintered glass framing fat body and outraged
face. In a minute a whistle shrieked, feet pelted. The runningboy was out of sight.
That night Starkie slept in an extremely wet and mouldy
haystack down in Roach’s Paddock, and found that the fascinating tramps who in his childhood had praised this formof sleeping accommodation were liars like the rest. The hay
knotted toughly in his ribs, smelt of mildew, and was full of atiny red creeping parasite which bit. For two days he spent his
time dodging the public. He bought his food, sixpenn’orth at atime, warily over the counters of obscure shops. Always the eyes9of those who served him seemed hard and watchful. Always
he listened for the sound of the whistle. He made a businessof slinking through town on an elaborate, useless system ofcross-streets, never proceeding straight in any direction. It was
all purposeless, blind and hopeless. He would be picked up, andhe knew it. But apart from the game of hare and hounds, he had
nothing to do and nowhere to go.
It was on one of these elaborate games that the hare foundhimself outside the Drill Sheds. He had a feeling that They wereon his heels. He edged down to the Zealandia Hall, noticed
the flutter of the cotton Union Jack, and the straggling little
queue of men in civilian clothes, fell in line with them. He wassafe, camouflaged, doing what other men were doing without
attracting the notice of the police. He was inside the hall,looking across a desk into the eyes of a clean-shaven man who
snapped absent-mindedly as he asked a string of questions, butwhose thin mouth had a good-humoured quirk at the corners.
‘Ever been in gaol?’
He jumped. But ‘No,’ he said stolidly.
The eyes of the Captain behind the desk stared with someamusement at his clothes, still bearing the creases of a year in
the prison stores.
‘Nationality? Age?’
Starkie gave the nationality right, but his age as twenty.
‘Had any trouble at all ?’ drawled the Captain.
Starkie shook his head.
‘Very well, Stark.’ The Captain bent his head, scribbled fora moment on a piece of paper. ‘Chit for Dr Bevan, rooms in
Speight Street. Hop it, and report here when he’s done with you.’
Dr Bevan was easy. Hands that felt the stringy muscles in hislean body, shrewd eyes that stared at him. He went back withthe chit to the Zealandia Hall, passed fit for active service.

10

14

Le Havref i r s t t h e b a r be d w i r e , not little eighteen-inch cobwebs

such as were spun over No Man’s Land, but sprawling entanglements of a considerable height; then the tents where themilitary prisoners lived, except when under special punishment, which meant indoors attention in the galvanized ironboxes. All around the compound, which covered about anacre and a half, were little sentry-towers like the pill-boxes of
No Man’s Land. Separated from the military prisoners onlyby the barbed-wire entanglements, German prisoners sang,worked, and tramped stolidly up and down their own little cagein full view of the three hundred British soldiers – Tommies,
Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, men from every
corner of the Empire – who were the especial charge of the
English Major and N.C.O.s who ran the gaol. These were all
Imperial Army men, and tougher than their own boots, or eventhan the meat they served out to the prisoners.
Starkie’s first three days were in the cell. He was kept in irons,
and lived on the daily ration of a pound loaf of bread, throwninto his little box every morning. They gave him as much water
as he could drink, but no tobacco and no society, for which,at the end of his spell in solitary confinement, he was beginning to pine. There wasn’t even the tramp of a sentry passing
by. He was as alone as though the blazing crumps had really11finished the world once and for all, as so often in the trenches
they had threatened to do.
On his fourth day in Le Havre he was put into a tent with
Ginger Crombie, of the Royal Irish Rifles, doing a stretch of
five years, and the two new-comers who had arrived with him –George Moran and George Cummings. Moran seemed dazed
and stupid; but as soon as Starkie had time to settle in his tent,
he knew that part of it was all right. Each one of his tent-mates
passed him over a little parcel, bread and meat saved up fromtheir own rations. It was law in the military prison that theprisoners stood together, and infinitely closer to them thanthe officers were the round-eyed, square-headed giants whosevacant faces stared through the barbed-wire entanglementsfrom the German compound.
But when the prisoners were put to work next morning,
Starkie knew that this was no place for him. The basic idea of
discipline for the refractory was ‘breaking them in’. This was
best done by endless, purposeless tasks, with no reason and nocompletion: no moment when the satisfaction of a job finishedand done with might make a man’s eyes light up. The individualist was dealt with by being treated as the ox under the goad.
Early in the morning they started to roll heavy bridge timbers,
fourteen feet in length, across the prison-yard, building them up
in tiers of an equal height. When this was finished, they tore thetimber-stacks down, rolled them on to handcarts and trundledthem off to be stacked up again in another corner. Over andover again the same movements, the wrenching, back-breaking
tugging at the great timber-piles, were made, and made fornothing. The rain poured down, but in no way infringed on
their occupation. At noon they were marched back to the gaol,
given potatoes and a tin of fat and water glorified by the nameof bully beef, taken back to the yards, and put to precisely the12same toil. At four o’clock they were marched back to the gaoland locked up.
There is another excellent means of taming the rebellious,and it was used at Le Havre. Hunger. After a few days Starkie
was used to seeing military prisoners hunt like pariah dogs for
scraps of food. They grubbed in the mud for pieces of banana
and orange peel, and the days which took them down to thebeach to hammer stakes into the sand were welcomed for the
chance they brought of picking up potatoes washed in fromthe boats. Cigarette butts were treasured like gold. Frenchsoldiers walked past the prisoners on the beach, chewing
tobacco, and when they spat the cuds from their mouths,
these were picked up, taken back to the compound and driedout, to be rolled in bits of bark for cigarettes. Tobacco was
the worst craving, and gaunt British soldiers handed breadover the wires to the German prisoners, who would trade cigarettes for food. No gift packages, however belated, ever got
through to the military prisoners, whereas the Germans did
occasionally get the parcels made up for them by mothers andsweethearts in little towns behind the Black Forest. Hunger
and cold weren’t as formidable as the craving for tobacco.
Soldiers hung about by the compound wire, dodged theguards, and threw the shirts from their backs to the Germans,in the hope – usually vain – that a cigarette might be tossedback.
The four o’clock march back to the prison tents didn’t mean
any cessation of their duties. Each man was given a prison taskof burnishing up old iron – stirrups, spurs, and chains, left lying
about on the battlefields. It came into the prison with the redrust of its months on No Man’s Land eating into it; the prisoners, with rags and sandpaper, had the duty of burnishing it
like silver. Failure at this meant shot drill.

13

Starkie got three days’ shot drill at an early date. The prisoners were marched out into an exercise yard under SergeantJackson. Each man was given a forty-pound block of concrete.
He had to hold this straight out from his body, keeping his arms
rigid, march four paces, bend his knees, and lower the concrete
block to the ground, his arms still held straight; then rise, lift theblock back to its first position again, march another four paces,
and go through the same performance. It had the same happy
logic possessed by the treadmill and the crank in the vilest of
the early Victorian gaols.
When Starkie had lifted and lowered the concrete block
twenty times, Sergeant Jackson still didn’t like the way he held
his arms. ‘I’ll show you how to hold that thing,’ he snapped, anddid so. ‘Hold it like this.’ Starkie received the block thrust into hisarms again, but only for a moment. Then he dropped it on thesergeant’s toes, and a howl of fury showed that even the Imperial
Army self-control may be flawed in certain emergencies.
After that he was given seven days on bread and water in thepunishment cell, with ‘figure eights’ for four hours each day.
When the bread was thrown in, early in the morning, his arms
were locked behind him at wrist and elbow. A wise man would
have waited for freedom, but his body was crying out for food.
He would creep across the stone floor of the cell, and kneelingor lying on the ground eat the bread exactly as a dog gnaws
a bone. The contortions involved by this amused his guard,
and he usually had an audience of grinning faces and voices
barking encouragement. The ghost of a chance, and he would
have murdered at least one of those men – it wouldn’t havemattered which, they were all the same, shadows of the face hehad loathed since his childhood. He could dream at night ofbringing down his handcuffs on their heads, waiting behind thewood-stack with a club. The chance never came.

14

The men were woken at six o’clock, in the bitter black
twilight of the winter mornings, with a faint rime of sea-salton the wind. They stripped to their trousers and weremarched out to the square. Half the company drilled while
the others crowded into the wash-house to scrub faces andheads under a tap. A watch was kept on them in the latrines,
and if they didn’t tumble out quickly enough to suit theirguards they were dragged out. After half an hour’s drill they
were marched into line and received their breakfast dole –bread, a bowl of porridge without either milk or sugar, andwater in lieu of tea. A new prison task was set for them after
the first few weeks. They were put to making duckboards forthe trenches.
Every man was expected to make thirty duckboards aday, and it couldn’t be done. A little yellow-faced devil of an
ex-carpenter curried favour by setting a crack pace, and grinned
over his shoulder as the inexperienced, with their butter-fingers,
cursed in trying to keep up with him. They hurried, blundered,smashed their fingers and thumbs with the hammers, andwere always behind in the end. Starkie knocked off work fora moment to pick up what looked like a heaven-sent cigarettebutt from the mud. Sergeant Jackson’s little cane played its
tattoo on the back of his knuckles.
This time Starkie didn’t hit the sergeant or anyone else.
He grew as pale as is possible for a man of his colour, andstared at him.
‘Well, Butterfingers, what about it?’ invited Sergeant Jackson.
‘I’m going to get out of here, I’m going to escape.’‘Mad, are you? Well, try escaping from the clink for a start.’
Door locked, walls of iron, floors of stone, no sky, no voice.
Then the tall Major stood over him.
‘What’s this about escape, Stark?’15

$39.99
198 x 130mm, 320pp, paperback
ISBN: 9781869408398
Published: June 201516