Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  Finnegan’s cook was a Norwegian sailor who had deserted from his ship at the Bluff, and everyone knew that he hadn’t had a bath for years. He had worn one suit of clothes, night and day, and they stuck to him. Beard and haircut were of the same grand old minor-prophet style, grey and clotted with grease. For all that, Olaf—if you didn’t mind about bodily beauty—was a stouthearted and good-natured fellow, and nothing was too much trouble for him in the preparation of the awful messes he turned out for the boys. One day he announced plum duff, and the boys scoured the ranges to get him eggs. They came back with eighteen and a packet of sultanas filched from a store at the bottom of the Valley, and Tom Finnegan lent an old white shirt for the boiling of the duff. Starkie stacked the wood, new-chopped red logs of manuka. The duff boiled for three hours, and the rattle of tin plates was a newly invented song of the flax-cutters. Olaf went out in triumph. He returned, blinking tears away from his sparse white lashes, a vast black pot in his hands. The boys looked on the duff.

  ‘I ban forget to tie her oop,’ explained Olaf sadly. After that they reverted to eggs and bacon, when they could get the eggs and when the bacon wasn’t too much like salted leather.

  Tom Finnegan had his off days, and Starkie struck one of them when the flax bundles were being unloaded from the waggons at the mill. Finnegan was on the waggon passing down the bundles. Whether his aim was good or bad Starkie never learned; but one of the hundredweight bundles struck him on the back of the head, almost snapping his neck. Down he went, his face driven into the soggy peat. He staggered to his feet, his mouth full of turf, and the moment he could spit it out told Finnegan what he thought of him. But it would appear that the Irish don’t like being called bastards—for Finnegan dragged the back chain across the waggon, and brought it rattling down over Starkie’s shoulders. That hurt. Starkie had a clasp-knife that had done for sawing wood, chopping tobacco, and a good many other things. He stuck it out, point upwards. Down came Finnegan’s arm with the weight of the chain behind it, and before the Irishman could save himself, that weight dragged the blade of the open knife clean through the muscles of his arm.

  There was a fight, but Finnegan was groggy with pain, and forgot for a moment what he had learned in the ring; or luck was against him, as it can be against the toughest. Starkie looked with shock and with the beginning of a scared feeling at Tom’s jaw, which stuck out in a very queer way, and wobbled hideously when he tried to speak. The men ran up and carried Tom to the nearest sledge.

  ‘My God, but you’re for it!’ one of them told Starkie. ‘Breaking the boss’s jaw won’t half get you a sweet time down below. Better clear out while the going’s good, kid.’

  Starkie cleared. At the flax-mill he drew his pay from Bob Finnegan—£24—and, more in bravado than in lawful spirit, claimed the extra week’s notice due to him as a member of the Flaxmillers’ Union. He got it. It then became apparent that £26 would profit him very little when the Blue Boys picked him up, and the expediency of getting away from the flax-mill at once presented itself. He walked out of the hut, borrowed Tom Finnegan’s tethered horse, and rode into the bush to find his brother George.

  George took the news of his brother’s new war very philosophically, merely producing a frying-pan and commanding, ‘Well, you get into that hut and cook us a feed.’ A moment later his head popped round the door once again, and he said with stark ferocity, ‘And it better be a good feed, see?’ Then he disappeared until evening. Starkie provided his brother with a good feed: corn-cakes, fried vegetables mashed up with tinned salmon, floury scones, and the bacon crisp. George was his idea both of God and of the Devil. The elder Stark’s complexion was so much lighter than Starkie’s that he might almost have passed for one of his mother’s race. But, beside him, James Douglas Stark looked like a schoolboy, and felt like one. George stood six feet seven in his socks, and was broad in proportion. He was a temperate man, had a mind cold and hard as the business edge of a tomahawk, and regarded his brother as a fool kid. Secretly, Starkie worshipped him—but would never have dared to mention or show it. George regarded the thrashing of Starkie as a natural duty, and undertook it at many odd moments. But he had a way of coming to the rescue—in prison, in war, in estaminets….

  Next day the Blue Boys were seen coming up the valley. George gave a long cooee of warning from the higher hills. Starkie took the hint and was off again—not entirely discouraged, for he had eggs, bacon, and billy tea in his stomach and £26 in his pocket. When he got to the bottom of Wyndham Valley, wearing dungarees and a woollen shirt, it seemed obvious that dressed as he was he would make no hit in life, and he bought a ready-made suit in a little valley shop. There was no place in the shop where he could try on underclothes, so he went across to a public-house, and there, in front of a fly-specked mirror, admired his fawn shirt, narrow-toed shoes, shoulders square in the new suit. Then it occurred to him that it was a great pity to break into his £26 for vanity, and he departed quietly from the back door of the public-house, carrying one more sin on his conscience and leaving behind him a tailor with shattered faith in human nature.

  He jumped the express from the bottom of Wyndham Valley and went straight through to Christchurch, where Alf Byron, living out by the Sydenham workshops, welcomed him as a lodger in his sooty little house with the dejected sunflowers in the front garden.

  Alf was a ganger on the wharf at Lyttelton; and his son Arthur, just topping Starkie for age—Starkie was nearing the end of his fifteenth year—worked down among the cranes and wharf-trucks. Father and son were economists.

  ‘Why blow it?’ said Alf, of Starkie’s £26. ‘Keep it in your stocking, boy, and pay your way on the wharves. There’s plenty doing down there for a kid with shoulders on him.’

  Shoulder, whatever else he lacked, Starkie could certainly offer. The months of flax-cutting had toughened him to whipcord, and his brown skin shone with health. At fifteen, he could have passed for a youth of twenty, and was careful not to undeceive those blades who took him for one of their mature community. Cloth cap, brilliant ties, shirts of many colours—he imitated the blades in every respect. The work on the Lyttelton wharves was after his own heart, a sociable proposition, the men standing in groups, red-kerchiefed, hard-muscled, rough-tongued, until they were called for by the unloading ships.

  He worked for precisely four hours as a dock labourer, unloading from the Ionic. Then along came a little man who had not shaved himself, but seemed none the less confident for that.

  ‘Are you a scab?’ hissed the little man in Starkie’s ear.

  ‘Scab which? I’ve only come here this morning.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said the little man, with profound contempt. ‘Green. … Well, are you coming out with the rest of the boys, or are you staying on, Scabby?’

  Starkie came out; not merely for fear of the one really opprobrious term in the New Zealand worker’s vocabulary, but because the delights of loading mutton were not to be compared with the excitement of being involved in the strike. And the strike was no baby. Nineteen-thirteen brought Prime Minister Bill Massey’s cockies riding into town—strike-breakers armed with pick-handles and ready to smash any head that came in their way. On the other hand, if one of the ‘cocky’ specials fell among strangers who didn’t like his manner or traditions, he might be wary of the boots that would as soon kick in a strike-breaker’s head as not. The strike had spread from one end of New Zealand to the other. The men weren’t in it alone. In Christchurch, the strikers’ women helped the Unions to win camping-ground in Hagley Park. Here on hundreds of acres of brown grass, ringed in by the stately old English trees planted by the pioneers, tents went up like toadstools. The married men drew rations at Hagley Park and slept at home, but the single lads were fed, bedded, and entertained under the oak trees. Half the city was in sympathy. People from Christchurch gave them cricket bats, women came with concertinas and fiddles and held open-air concerts in the sweet evenings. The youths, with red rosettes in their coats, against whom every newsp
aper in the country poured forth the vials of its soapy wrath, sang ‘Annie Laurie’ and ‘Swannee’ with as much enthusiasm and more tune than the then little-known Internationale.

  When the cocky specials landed in Christchurch, riding up the main streets somewhat like John Gilpin, but in sterner frame of mind, the Hagley Park camp was deserted. The young men went down town looking for trouble, which not infrequently they found. Specials never rode alone, and the red rosettes marched in gangs, three or four abreast, ready for the challenge. Men climbed on packing-cases and bridge parapets and made fiery speeches. The specials rode at them and batoned their skulls with pick-handles. The baton wound, a long shallow cut of four inches or so, provides enough gore to look more serious than it really is, and tales of bloody murder were rife in town.

  The batoning of Bob Simpson, who had worked on the wharf during Starkie’s one lone day as a dock-labourer, provoked a crisis. It wouldn’t have been so awkward had not the little party—Simpson, Starkie, and three gentlemen friends—emerged from an hotel laden with bottles of excellent brown ale just as the specials rode by. The specials were young men adroit at taking umbrage. They had a good deal of excuse. Howls of ‘Scab’, ‘Cocky’, or the simple combination, ‘Cocky Scab’, followed them wherever they rode, sometimes adorned with more sinister embellishments. The old lack of understanding between town and country was in full play. The young men used to a clay soil and the smell of cows didn’t believe in the muscle or physical courage of the young men used to scrubby patches of garden and a smell of malt. In this they were deluded, as their own frequent downfalls, and later the war years, were to prove. In the meantime, there was between them a mutual hatred and contempt. White arm-bandage and red rosette loved each other as tiger loves jaguar.

  Bob Simpson was maybe correct in what he said as to the special’s ancestry and personal habits. It was a matter of opinion—and didn’t, in Starkie’s view, justify the speed with which the special rode straight into the arcade, and brought down his pick-handle over Bob’s head. Bob dropped like a log. A moment later the special dropped too—not like a log, but like a wildcat. Starkie dragged him by one leg from his horse, and settled further argument by the fatally handy means of the beer-bottle. Then he ran, and not before it was time. Dodging through the arcade, where the mounted specials could not follow, gave him three minutes’ grace, and during that time he espied a bicycle.

  The city of Christchurch has only one ambition. It likes to be thought more English than the English. Its pioneers were almost exclusively church settlers, and brought with them English seedling trees, English architecture, English tradition. The results, as applied to the originally flat and dreary expanse where Christchurch was built, are extremely charming and extremely insincere. Stone arches cup a pale sunlight between their uplifted hands. Hagley Park sweeps brown and green over many acres, there is a sad little stream, only deep enough to drown an occasional stray cat and float the canoes of picnickers, which by suffering its smooth banks to be covered with the long green tresses of the weeping willow has become a scenic feature, and is dignified by the soubriquet of the River Avon. If you want to be beloved among the citizens, you produce the more English than the English cliché. You can rest assured they will never even suspect that the overdoing of such a thing is an atrocity.

  But the sinister truth about Christchurch is that it is predominantly not the City of English trees, but the city of bicycles. People who in any other city would commit hara-kiri before mounting one of these ignoble vehicles, in Christchurch cycle and are proud of it. Archbishops cycle, mayors cycle, private detectives cycle, fashionable wantons cycle. When Starkie removed a cycle and thus escaped from the city, he was removing nothing rich and rare, but rather helping in a small way to solve the most inextricable problem of traffic and morbid psychology that has yet arisen in New Zealand.

  With the exception of a cigarette, lit between shaking hands and puffed by the wayside, he never halted for refreshments until he reached the Bealey Tunnel. The men on construction work there wouldn’t give him a job, but welcomed him for his dramatic news of the strike. He washed shirts for the brawny West Coasters, who decked themselves out for dancing after nightfall, cooked stews with fair success, ran errands to the nearest stores and public-houses. Four West Coast months were free, safe, not unamusing—though he was lonely for the Red Rosettes and the camp in Hagley Park.

  The Riccarton races fell at the end of the fourth month, and although this celebrated event takes place on a course within Christchurch boundaries, Starkie felt that the police must by now have enough on their minds to have forgotten an assault and theft of so stale a vintage.

  What really cut his pride was that he was drinking lemonade and sarsaparilla at the time of his downfall. Beer, he had determined, was not for him. Beer meant trouble.

  ‘Have a whisky, Starkie!’ yelled an exuberant comrade.

  A heavy hand fell on his shoulder. A voice said quietly, ‘Starkie, is it?’

  His heart started to beat very fast. He didn’t look round at the face, but at the big square-toed boots. Then he stared around. They were all about him.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said the voice reproachfully. ‘Let’s see—just on four months.’

  At the Christchurch police-station they must have liked sparrows, for they fed the prisoners on crumbs. Furthermore, the cell boasted three blankets—all lousy. He slept not at all. He had already met fleas and flat, unpleasant bugs; but the louse in New Zealand confines its activities for the most part to prisons or Salvation Army hostels, and its guile was strange to him. He scratched all night, and in the morning when he appeared before a magistrate, at the Christchurch police-court, he was unshaven, crumpled, and disreputable.

  ‘The court is now open.’

  Everyone stood up. Starkie was gently urged into the dock. The magistrate peered at him.

  ‘A Maori, is he?’

  Sergeant Emerson, of the Mounted Police from Invercargill, spoke up. Starkie heard the complicated facts of his ancestry truthfully explained.

  ‘Red Indian,’ said the magistrate, with sad satisfaction. ‘A savage.’ The charge of assaulting a special constable and making off with a bicycle was droned out. The air in the court smelt fusty. All the positions of vantage were occupied by thin, grey, unaired-looking lawyers. A small gallery of loafers shuffled uneasily, standing behind a rail which bisected the court. There was no seating accommodation for the public, but reporters lounged in their chairs and drew diagrams with pencil-stubs at one side of the room.

  Starkie pleaded guilty. He had no lawyer, and no case. Nevertheless a moment’s incredulous and angry surprise shook him when the magistrate said, almost playfully, ‘One year’s imprisonment with hard labour.’

  Somebody laid hold on his arm. He was led out of the dock. He looked back desperately, wondering if George or his father might have slipped in at the back of the little crowd; but Sergeant Emerson’s was the only face known to him. The reporters and legal gentlemen all looked studiously unconcerned, like fish in an aquarium. His feet stumbled on the first steps of a shallow stone stair leading downwards from the court-room.

  3 Ring and Dummy

  WHEN the police escort delivered Starkie from the train at the Invercargill gaol, it was 7.30 at night, and the place, being for the most part invisible, didn’t reveal its secrets, pleasant or otherwise. They gave him a basin of cold stew, a plate of bread-and-butter, and a cup of tea. Then a key turned. He was left in his own clothes, and with the Christchurch lock-up’s contribution of lice. In the cell he lay quiet and alone, and tried to figure out the number of hours in a year, but gave it up. He could hear nothing but an occasional tramp of footsteps along a stone corridor, and wished they had given him somebody for company, even a drunk.

  Next morning, beginning from the reveille hour of six, he said good-bye to civilian life. First he was taken to the store. Here they finger-and-thumb you, get the details of scars or tattoo marks, where you were born, how
your father came to marry your mother, the way your great-aunt’s hair curls. He was handed a uniform, of which the white trousers and brown coat were less unsightly than the two-peaked cap—which seemed designed to make the convict look like a bus driver going and coming. A warder marched him to a cell, stood in the corridor while Starkie took up position on the other side of the door-way.

  ‘Strip,’ ordered the warder.

  Starkie removed his clothes, and said good-bye to his cigarettes. When the convict is mother-naked, his clothes are thrown out piece by piece to the warder, and the uniform tossed in. His own suit goes to the stores, where, if the warders don’t take a fancy to his cigarettes or such little trifles, the prisoners in charge of the store department get the pickings.

  The cell’s construction was simple. A hammock provided him with better sleeping accommodation than the stone bench he had vaguely expected. Seven bars criss-crossed the window, and a ventilator in one corner of the roof was the free air’s only other channel. The door had a little spy-hole through which the warder on night duty could peer every few minutes. All through the first night he never slept, for one of the walls echoed with the tiny tap-tap-tap of the man in the next cell. Starkie didn’t then understand the Morse code, but he did understand that a convict’s first duty is to get the knack of this, and settled down to working it out. The tap-tap-tap—unintelligible, friendly, gentle—went on for hours. In the corridor the warder’s boots rang hollow, like some armoured ghost of the Middle Ages plodding by on doom’s journey.